Transmedia aesthetics: narrative design for vast storyworlds

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TRANSMEDIA AESTHETICS:
NARRATIVE DESIGN FOR VAST STORYWORLDS

by
Geoffrey Alexander Long

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
(CINEMATIC ARTS: MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE)

August 2018

Copyright 2018 Geoffrey Alexander Long

Long 2
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ 2
Transmedia Aesthetics: Narrative Design for Vast Storyworlds .......................................... 25
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 26
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... 27
Introduction: One Life in Early Transmedia Storytelling ......................................................... 30
What Is This Book, And Who Is It For? ............................................................................... 43
In a West Coast State of Mind .............................................................................................. 46
Transform and Roll Out ........................................................................................................ 48
I. What is Transmedia Storytelling? ......................................................................................... 49
A Brief Note on the Terminology Wars ............................................................................... 54
New Stories for a New Audience .......................................................................................... 59
II. Designing Transmedia Storyworlds ..................................................................................... 65
Transmedia Resistance and the Four Stages of Transmedia Experiences ............................ 65
Discover ............................................................................................................................ 65
Collect ............................................................................................................................... 66
Consume ........................................................................................................................... 67
React ................................................................................................................................. 68
Transmedia Storytelling as Game Design ............................................................................. 69
Story Bibles, Game Design Documents and Narrative Design Documents ......................... 72
Television Story Bibles ..................................................................................................... 72
Long 3
Case Study: Batman: The Animated Series .................................................................. 72
Case Study: Battlestar Galactica .................................................................................. 73
Case Study: LOST ......................................................................................................... 75
Video Game Design Documents and Story Bibles ........................................................... 76
Case Study: Doom......................................................................................................... 77
Case Study: Grand Theft Auto ...................................................................................... 79
Case Study: Grim Fandango ........................................................................................ 80
Narrative Design Documents for Transmedia Storyworlds .............................................. 81
Exercise: Creating the Narrative Design Document ......................................................... 85
III. 10 Transmedia Aesthetics ................................................................................................... 88
1. Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement ............................................................. 91
Multiple Audiences ........................................................................................................... 92
Richard Bartle’s Player Types ...................................................................................... 93
Leveraged Engagement ................................................................................................... 100
Case Study: LEGO .......................................................................................................... 102
Case Study: HBO and Game of Thrones ........................................................................ 104
Action: Evaluating Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement ............................ 108
Action: Creating Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement ............................... 109
Example: Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement in Spookshow .................... 110
2. Unique Storyworld Characteristics ................................................................................. 115
Core Storyworld Characteristics ..................................................................................... 118
Long 4
Iconic Franchise Characteristics ..................................................................................... 121
Character Storyworld Characteristics ............................................................................. 123
Stylistic Storyworld Characteristics ................................................................................ 125
Evaluating Unique Storyworld Characteristics ............................................................... 128
Creating Unique Storyworld Characteristics .................................................................. 129
Core Franchise Characteristics ................................................................................... 130
Iconic Franchise Characteristics ................................................................................. 130
Character Franchise Characteristics ............................................................................ 131
Case Study: Batman .................................................................................................... 132
Stylistic Franchise Characteristics .............................................................................. 134
Action: Evaluating Unique Franchise Characteristics .................................................... 135
Action: Creating Unique Storyworld Characteristics ..................................................... 136
Example: Unique Storyworld Characteristics in Spookshow .......................................... 136
3. World-Centric Narrative Design (with a Human Lens at the Center) ............................ 144
From Plot to Character to World .................................................................................... 145
Telling the Story of a World ........................................................................................... 147
Case Study: Minority Report .......................................................................................... 149
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as Worldbuilding Tool .................................................... 153
Sidebar: Fragmentation ................................................................................................... 155
Maps as Worldbuilding Tools ......................................................................................... 157
Case Study: The Lord of the Rings ................................................................................. 159
Long 5
Placing a Human Lens at the Center ............................................................................... 160
Action: Evaluating World-Centric Narrative Design ..................................................... 175
Action: Creating World-Centric Narrative Design ......................................................... 175
Example: World-Centric Narrative Design in Spookshow ............................................. 176
Biological/Physiological (Basic Survival Needs) ....................................................... 178
Safety (Conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature) ....................................................... 179
Love/Belonging (from Conflict comes Community) .................................................. 180
Esteem (Social Grouping gives rise to Ordering) ....................................................... 181
Arts + Cultures (how different groups design w/ different aesthetics) ....................... 182
Self-Actualization (Desire to Optimize Self) .............................................................. 183
The Human Lens at the Center ................................................................................... 189
4. Resonant Simple-Story Myths ........................................................................................ 191
The Art of the Simple-Story ........................................................................................... 192
Case Studies: Simple-Stories in Pop Culture Epics ........................................................ 200
The Simple-Story Spark Generator ................................................................................. 203
Action: Evaluating Resonant Simple-Story Myths ......................................................... 204
Action: Creating Resonant Simple-Story Myths ............................................................ 205
Example: Resonant Simple-Story Myths in Spookshow ................................................. 205
5. Extensible Character Design ........................................................................................... 208
Plot-Driven versus Character-Driven Stories ................................................................. 209
Designing Character Types ............................................................................................. 212
Long 6
Character Journeys ...................................................................................................... 214
Alignment ................................................................................................................... 217
Character Classes ........................................................................................................ 219
Designing Extensible Characters for Multiple Media .................................................... 221
Name ........................................................................................................................... 221
Look and Silhouette .................................................................................................... 226
Sound .......................................................................................................................... 231
Gestures and Trademark Actions ................................................................................ 232
Embodied Mysteries ................................................................................................... 234
Legendary Character Artifacts .................................................................................... 237
Action: Evaluating Extensible Character Design ........................................................... 238
Action: Creating Extensible Character Design ............................................................... 238
Example: Extensible Character Design in Spookshow ................................................... 239
Character Types: Alignment and Character Classes ................................................... 239
Names ......................................................................................................................... 240
Look and Silhouette .................................................................................................... 240
Sound, Gestures and Trademark Actions .................................................................... 243
Embodied Mysteries ................................................................................................... 243
6. Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture ............................................ 244
Fractal Storytelling .......................................................................................................... 245
Case Study: Star Wars ................................................................................................ 245
Long 7
Case Study: The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings........................................................... 247
Sidebar: a Disclaimer .................................................................................................. 248
Simple-Stories, Super-Stories and Themes ..................................................................... 249
Case Study: Buffy the Vampire Slayer ........................................................................ 249
Case Study: Star Trek ................................................................................................. 251
Case Study: Star Wars ................................................................................................ 252
The Importance of Themes ......................................................................................... 254
Extensible Narrative Architecture ................................................................................... 260
Case Study: Star Wars ................................................................................................ 260
Case Study: Assassin’s Creed ..................................................................................... 263
Case Study: Doctor Who ............................................................................................. 269
Side-Stories ..................................................................................................................... 271
Case Study: The X-Files .............................................................................................. 273
The Challenge of Extensions ...................................................................................... 275
Evaluating Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture ......................... 276
Creating Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture ............................. 278
Action: Evaluating Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture ............ 279
Action: Creating Extensible Narrative Architecture and Fractal Storytelling ................ 280
Example: Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture in Spookshow .... 281
7. Additive Comprehension ................................................................................................ 284
Case Study: Why So Serious? ..................................................................................... 285
Long 8
Case Study: The Matrix .............................................................................................. 286
Writing Like a Game Designer ................................................................................... 287
Case Study: Star Trek ................................................................................................. 293
Action: Evaluating Additive Comprehension ................................................................. 294
Action: Creating Additive Comprehension .................................................................... 295
Example: Additive Comprehension in Spookshow ......................................................... 295
8. Multiple Experience Pathways and Modularity .............................................................. 298
Negative Space, Negative Capability and Migratory Cues ............................................ 299
Experience Pathways ...................................................................................................... 305
Time ............................................................................................................................ 306
Locations ..................................................................................................................... 308
Objects ........................................................................................................................ 310
Characters ................................................................................................................... 311
Modularity ................................................................................................................... 313
Key Takeaways ........................................................................................................... 314
Action: Evaluating Experience Pathways and Modularity ............................................. 315
Action: Creating Experience Pathways and Modularity ................................................. 315
Example: Multiple Experience Pathways, Negative Space, Migratory Cues and
Modularity in Spookshow ............................................................................................... 316
9. Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances ........................................................... 319
Film ............................................................................................................................. 322
Long 9
Video Games ............................................................................................................... 326
Text and Print .............................................................................................................. 330
Television .................................................................................................................... 336
Audio........................................................................................................................... 339
Comics ........................................................................................................................ 342
Alternate Reality Games ............................................................................................. 346
A Very Important Disclaimer ..................................................................................... 348
The New Screens ........................................................................................................ 356
Virtual Reality ......................................................................................................... 358
Augmented Reality ................................................................................................. 364
Connected Homes and Smart Cities ....................................................................... 371
Tangible Storytelling .............................................................................................. 378
Unconventional Media ................................................................................................ 384
Clothing .................................................................................................................. 384
Food ........................................................................................................................ 386
Locations ................................................................................................................. 388
Building Worlds for a Future of Ubiquitous Storytelling ............................................... 393
Action: Evaluating Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances ............................ 397
Action: Creating Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances ............................... 397
Example: Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances in Spookshow .................... 398
Animation ................................................................................................................... 398
Long 10
Comics ........................................................................................................................ 399
Illustrated Novellas ..................................................................................................... 400
Moving Forward: Audio ............................................................................................. 401
10. Collaborative Authorship, Clear Canon(s) and Multiplicity ......................................... 403
Collaborative Authorship ................................................................................................ 404
The Conservative Perspective: Who Writes the Bible? .............................................. 405
The Liberal Perspective: Storyworlds as Communal Playgrounds ............................. 410
The Middle Ground: Storyworlds as Invitations to Play ............................................ 413
Clear Canon(s) ................................................................................................................ 418
Multiplicity ..................................................................................................................... 425
The Four-Quadrant Challenge .................................................................................... 427
Case Study: Superman, Lois & Clark, and Smallville .................................................... 428
In-World Multiplicity: Complicating Canon for Creative Gain ..................................... 430
Sidebar: DC Comics’ Elseworlds ................................................................................... 432
Action: Evaluating Collaborative Authorship, Clear Canon(s) and Multiplicity ........... 433
Action: Creating Collaborative Authorship, Clear Canon(s) and Multiplicity ............... 433
Example: Collaborative Authorship, Clear Canon(s) and Multiplicity in Spookshow ... 434
Collaborative Authorship ............................................................................................ 434
Clear Canon(s) and Multiplicity ................................................................................. 435
IV. Transmedia Mechanics ..................................................................................................... 437
Action: Evaluating Transmedia Mechanics .................................................................... 442
Long 11
Action: Creating Transmedia Mechanics ........................................................................ 442
Example: Transmedia Mechanics in Spookshow ............................................................ 442
V: The Art of the Pitch ........................................................................................................ 445
Pitching Basics ................................................................................................................ 445
Design Fictions ............................................................................................................... 450
A Pitch Presentation Format ........................................................................................... 454
The Executive Summary (aka the One-Pager) ................................................................ 455
The Pitch Bible ............................................................................................................... 456
Action: Evaluating the Pitch ........................................................................................... 460
Action: Creating the Pitch ............................................................................................... 460
Example: Pitching Spookshow ........................................................................................ 461
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 464
Example: Putting the Pieces Together in Spookshow ......................................................... 466
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 468
Appendix I: A Transmedia Story Scorecard ....................................................................... 482
Appendix II: A Transmedia Storyworld-Building Framework .......................................... 486
Spookshow Narrative Design Document ................................................................................. 494
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................ 495
I. Overview ............................................................................................................................. 496
1.1. Contents ....................................................................................................................... 496
1.2. High-Level Concept and Franchise Positioning .......................................................... 498
Long 12
Genre X+Y ...................................................................................................................... 498
Closest Competitors ........................................................................................................ 499
Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them ........................................... 499
Lockwood & Co. ......................................................................................................... 500
Carnivale ..................................................................................................................... 501
1.3. Themes ......................................................................................................................... 502
1.4. Target Audience ........................................................................................................... 503
1.5. Storyworld Aesthetic ................................................................................................... 506
II. Storyworld .......................................................................................................................... 517
2.1. Central What-If ............................................................................................................ 517
Biological/Physiological (Basic Survival Needs) ........................................................... 518
Food ............................................................................................................................ 518
Water ........................................................................................................................... 519
Transport ..................................................................................................................... 519
Reproduction ............................................................................................................... 519
Safety (Conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature) ........................................................... 520
Shelter ......................................................................................................................... 520
Clothing ...................................................................................................................... 520
Offense ........................................................................................................................ 521
Defense ....................................................................................................................... 521
Love/Belonging (from Conflict comes Community) ...................................................... 521
Long 13
Religion/Beliefs .......................................................................................................... 521
Community ................................................................................................................. 522
Family ......................................................................................................................... 522
Government ................................................................................................................. 522
Esteem (Social Grouping gives rise to Ordering) ........................................................... 522
Social Classes .............................................................................................................. 522
Economics ................................................................................................................... 522
Government Tiers ....................................................................................................... 523
Arts + Cultures (how different groups design w/ different aesthetics) ........................... 523
Visual Arts .................................................................................................................. 523
Language and Literature ............................................................................................. 523
Music........................................................................................................................... 524
Gameplay .................................................................................................................... 524
Self-Actualization (Desire to Optimize Self) .................................................................. 524
Mastery ....................................................................................................................... 524
Dominance .................................................................................................................. 524
2.2. Rules ............................................................................................................................ 525
Technology ..................................................................................................................... 525
Magic .............................................................................................................................. 526
Biomancy .................................................................................................................... 526
Necromancy ................................................................................................................ 526
Long 14
Technomancy .............................................................................................................. 527
Cryptomancy ............................................................................................................... 527
Combining Magic ....................................................................................................... 527
Magical Objects and Weaknesses ............................................................................... 528
Costs ............................................................................................................................ 528
Magical Creatures ....................................................................................................... 529
Other Abilities ................................................................................................................. 529
2.3. Maps ............................................................................................................................. 530
2.4. Timeline ....................................................................................................................... 531
III. Main Story, Super-Story and Side Stories ........................................................................ 540
3.1. Narrative Architecture ................................................................................................. 540
Release Cadence and Media Used .................................................................................. 541
Why Animation ........................................................................................................... 541
Why Comics ................................................................................................................ 541
Why an Illustrated Novella ......................................................................................... 542
Why an Encyclopedia ................................................................................................. 542
Artifacts ....................................................................................................................... 542
Other Media ................................................................................................................ 543
Extensible Narrative Architecture ................................................................................... 543
3.2. Super-Story .................................................................................................................. 544
3.3. Main Story: The Great Casey Smith ............................................................................ 544
Long 15
Spookshow 1928.01: The Show and the Sisters ............................................................. 545
Spookshow 1928.02: The City of Gods and Magic ........................................................ 547
Spookshow 1928.03: The Holy Fortress ......................................................................... 549
Spookshow 1928.04: The School of the Dead ................................................................ 549
Spookshow 1928.05: The Unforgiven Bazaar ................................................................ 550
Spookshow 1928.06: The Library of the Accused .......................................................... 550
Spookshow 1928.07: The Observatory and the Jailbreak ............................................... 551
Spookshow 1928.08: The City of Ghosts and Monsters ................................................ 552
Spookshow 1928.09: The Hidden Court ......................................................................... 552
Spookshow 1928.10: The Inquisitor’s Turn ................................................................... 554
Spookshow 1928.11: The Traveling City ....................................................................... 554
Spookshow 1928.12: The Cathedral of the Wild ............................................................ 555
Spookshow 1928.13: The Siege and the Exodus ............................................................ 555
3.4. Side Story: The Great Wilderness ................................................................................ 556
Spookshow 1921: The Haunting of Sebastian Shade ..................................................... 556
Spookshow 1923: The Inventor’s Heart ......................................................................... 557
Spookshow 1918: The Trader’s Bargain ........................................................................ 557
Spookshow 1924: The Secret Child ................................................................................ 557
Spookshow 1925: The Faerie Hunter ............................................................................. 557
Spookshow 1926: The Engineer’s Ghost ........................................................................ 558
3.5. Side Story: The Great Disaster .................................................................................... 558
Long 16
Spookshow 1917: The Secret and the Spell .................................................................... 558
Spookshow 1892: The Wand and the Wielder ............................................................... 558
Spookshow 1927: The Scholar and the Skull ................................................................. 559
Spookshow 1919: The Priest’s Confession .................................................................... 559
Spookshow 1920: The Weapon of God .......................................................................... 559
Spookshow 1922: The Witch and the Bishop ................................................................. 559
3.6. Experience Pathways ................................................................................................... 559
IV. Heroes ............................................................................................................................... 561
4.1. Casey Smith (1914-TBD) ............................................................................................ 561
4.2. Molly Smith (1917-TBD) ............................................................................................ 575
4.3. Seth Jameson (1913-TBD) ........................................................................................... 583
4.4. Sebastian Shade (1871-1928) ...................................................................................... 589
4.5. Robin McCloud (1912-TBD) ....................................................................................... 601
4.7. Megan “Creepy” Jones (1904-TBD) ........................................................................... 621
V. Villains ............................................................................................................................... 633
5.1. Father Jeremiah Stine (1861-TBD) .............................................................................. 633
5.2. Armand Arnaux (1883-1928) ...................................................................................... 640
5.3. Don Micheloni (1880-TBD) ........................................................................................ 643
5.5. Herne (N/A-N/A) ......................................................................................................... 650
5.6. Elder Yaga (1822-TBD) .............................................................................................. 655
5.7. Inquisitors .................................................................................................................... 661
Long 17
5.8. Inquisitor Jailors ........................................................................................................... 664
5.9. Inquisitor Scientists ...................................................................................................... 667
VI. Allies ................................................................................................................................. 669
6.1. Kendra Smith (1894-TBD) .......................................................................................... 669
6.2. David Smith (1892-TBD) ............................................................................................ 677
6.3. Helena MacAvoy (1877-1921) .................................................................................... 684
6.4. Captain Thomas North (1873-1921) ............................................................................ 688
6.5. Thadeus Cromwell (1849-TBD) .................................................................................. 691
6.6. Eleanor Bergen (1860-1883) ........................................................................................ 696
6.7. Mary Cromwell (1851-1921) ....................................................................................... 700
6.8. Baron Vollmond (1870-1907) ...................................................................................... 705
6.9. Father Anthony Donovan (1876-1928) ........................................................................ 710
6.10. Ricardo Espinosa (1898-TBD) .................................................................................. 715
6.11. King Auberon (N/A-N/A) .......................................................................................... 720
6.12. Queen Mab (N/A-N/A) .............................................................................................. 725
6.13. Karynna Sing (1904-TBD) ........................................................................................ 730
VII. Organizations ................................................................................................................... 734
7.1. The Church ................................................................................................................... 734
7.2. The Council .................................................................................................................. 735
7.3. The Explorers’ Union .................................................................................................. 736
7.4. The Hidden Court ........................................................................................................ 736
Long 18
7.5. Other Spookshows ....................................................................................................... 737
VIII. Places ............................................................................................................................. 738
8.1. The Great Wilderness .................................................................................................. 738
8.2. Bradbury, Illinois ......................................................................................................... 740
8.3. The Smith Family Farm ............................................................................................... 742
8.4. Shade’s Trailer ............................................................................................................. 744
8.5. Gears’ Trailer ............................................................................................................... 746
8.6. Creepy’s Trailer ........................................................................................................... 747
8.7. Robin’s Trailer ............................................................................................................. 748
8.8. Chicago, Illinois ........................................................................................................... 750
8.9. The Magicians’ Ward .................................................................................................. 752
8.10. The Sedgwick Hotel and the Sparrow’s Nest ............................................................ 754
8.11. Navy Pier ................................................................................................................... 756
8.12. The Cathedral of Chicago .......................................................................................... 758
8.13. New Orleans, Louisiana ............................................................................................. 760
8.14. Memphis, Tennessee .................................................................................................. 762
8.15. Versteck, Germany .................................................................................................... 763
8.16. The Vollmond Castle ................................................................................................. 765
8.17. The Holy Fortress ...................................................................................................... 767
8.18. The Unforgiven Bazaar .............................................................................................. 769
8.19. The Library of the Accused ....................................................................................... 771
Long 19
8.20. The Observatory ......................................................................................................... 772
8.21. Gothic, Colorado ........................................................................................................ 773
8.22. Faerie .......................................................................................................................... 775
8.23. The Cathedral of the Wild .......................................................................................... 777
IX. Artifacts ............................................................................................................................ 778
9.1. Weapons ....................................................................................................................... 778
Shade’s Wand ................................................................................................................. 778
Gears’ Mechanical Weapons .......................................................................................... 779
Creepy’s Weapons .......................................................................................................... 779
The Inquisitors’ Weapons ............................................................................................... 779
9.2. Wearables ..................................................................................................................... 780
Card Launchers ............................................................................................................... 780
Inquisitor Armor ............................................................................................................. 780
Wards .............................................................................................................................. 780
Talismans ........................................................................................................................ 781
9.3. Artifacts ........................................................................................................................ 782
The Codex Disastrous/The Codex Vollmond ................................................................. 782
Gears’ Automatons ......................................................................................................... 782
Clockwork Fireflies ........................................................................................................ 783
9.4. Vehicles ........................................................................................................................ 785
The Spookshow Caravan ................................................................................................ 785
Long 20
Inquisitors’ Vehicles ....................................................................................................... 786
The Traveling City .......................................................................................................... 787
The Smith Family Truck ................................................................................................. 787
The Dixie Guardian ......................................................................................................... 788
X. Bestiary .............................................................................................................................. 789
10.1. Copper Goblins .......................................................................................................... 790
10.2. Cracklesnakes ............................................................................................................ 791
10.3. Dust Dragons ............................................................................................................. 792
10.4. Firewolves .................................................................................................................. 793
10.5. Manticora ................................................................................................................... 794
10.6. Nine-Tailed Caterpillars ............................................................................................. 795
10.7. Nibbleknocks ............................................................................................................. 796
10.8. Nixies ......................................................................................................................... 797
10.9. Pixies .......................................................................................................................... 798
10.10. River Monsters ......................................................................................................... 799
10.11. Rock Sirens .............................................................................................................. 800
10.12. Sasquatch ................................................................................................................. 801
10.13. Satyrs........................................................................................................................ 803
10.14. Shufflers ................................................................................................................... 804
10.15. Skycats ..................................................................................................................... 805
10.16. Spriggans.................................................................................................................. 806
Long 21
10.17. The Vollmond Beast ................................................................................................ 807
10.18. The White Raven ..................................................................................................... 808
10.19. Wood Trolls ............................................................................................................. 809
XI. Franchise Plan ................................................................................................................... 810
11.1. Media Mix .................................................................................................................. 810
Primary Tentpole: Episodic JRPG + Animated Series ................................................... 810
Transmedia Extensions: Books and Comics ................................................................... 810
11.2. Distribution Timeline ................................................................................................. 812
Business Model ............................................................................................................... 812
11.3. Target Fan Profile Strategies ..................................................................................... 813
11.4. Fan Participation Strategies ....................................................................................... 816
11.5. Alternate Versions ..................................................................................................... 817
Spookshow: Manifest Destiny ......................................................................................... 818
Spookshow: Black Sands ................................................................................................. 819
Spookshow: Haunted Heart ............................................................................................ 819
11.6. Transmedia Mechanics .............................................................................................. 820
VIII. References ...................................................................................................................... 822
8.1. Movies.......................................................................................................................... 822
8.2. Television ..................................................................................................................... 823
8.3. Games .......................................................................................................................... 823
8.4. Books ........................................................................................................................... 824
Long 22
8.5. Comics ......................................................................................................................... 824
8.6. Music............................................................................................................................ 825
Spookshow .................................................................................................................................. 826
Introduction: Assembling a Spookshow ............................................................................... 827
The Challenge ..................................................................................................................... 828
The Concept ........................................................................................................................ 829
Spookshow: The Great Casey Smith / 1928.01: The Show and the Sisters ........................... 832
Scene One ........................................................................................................................... 833
Scene Two ........................................................................................................................... 837
Scene Three ......................................................................................................................... 842
Scene Four .......................................................................................................................... 848
Scene Five ........................................................................................................................... 858
Scene Six ............................................................................................................................. 865
Scene Seven ........................................................................................................................ 874
Scene Eight ......................................................................................................................... 886
Scene Nine .......................................................................................................................... 890
Scene Ten ............................................................................................................................ 895
Scene Eleven ....................................................................................................................... 901
Scene Twelve ...................................................................................................................... 914
Scene Thirteen .................................................................................................................... 915
Spookshow: The Great Wilderness / 1921: The Haunting of Sebastian Shade ..................... 920
Long 23
Scene One ........................................................................................................................... 921
Scene Two ........................................................................................................................... 930
Scene Three ......................................................................................................................... 938
Scene Four .......................................................................................................................... 949
Scene Five ........................................................................................................................... 963
Scene Six ............................................................................................................................. 971
Scene Seven ........................................................................................................................ 978
Scene Eight ......................................................................................................................... 988
Scene Nine .......................................................................................................................... 995
Scene Ten .......................................................................................................................... 1000
Scene Eleven ..................................................................................................................... 1002
Scene Twelve .................................................................................................................... 1010
Scene Thirteen .................................................................................................................. 1015
Spookshow: The Great Casey Smith / 1928.02: The City of Gods and Magic .................... 1024
Scene One ......................................................................................................................... 1025
Scene Two ......................................................................................................................... 1032
Scene Three ....................................................................................................................... 1040
Scene Four ........................................................................................................................ 1048
Scene Five ......................................................................................................................... 1070
Scene Six ........................................................................................................................... 1073
Scene Seven ...................................................................................................................... 1078
Long 24
Scene Eight ....................................................................................................................... 1088
Scene Nine ........................................................................................................................ 1093
Scene Ten .......................................................................................................................... 1102
Scene Eleven ..................................................................................................................... 1108
Scene Twelve .................................................................................................................... 1119
Scene Thirteen .................................................................................................................. 1125
Spookshow: The Great Disaster / 1917: The Secret and the Spell ...................................... 1134
Chapter One ...................................................................................................................... 1135
Chapter Two ...................................................................................................................... 1140
Chapter Three .................................................................................................................... 1143
Chapter Four ..................................................................................................................... 1147
Chapter Five ...................................................................................................................... 1150
Chapter Six ........................................................................................................................ 1152
Chapter Seven ................................................................................................................... 1153
Chapter Eight .................................................................................................................... 1154
Chapter Nine ..................................................................................................................... 1155
Chapter Ten ....................................................................................................................... 1156
Chapter Eleven .................................................................................................................. 1157
Chapter Twelve ................................................................................................................. 1158
Chapter Thirteen ............................................................................................................... 1159
About the Author ...................................................................................................................... 1161
Long 25

Transmedia Aesthetics:
Narrative Design for Vast Storyworlds
Long 26
Abstract
The development of vast transmedia storyworlds has its own unique kind of beauty – a set of
transmedia aesthetics that make such creations easier for audiences to discover, collect, consume
and react to in myriad ways. This thesis and its accompanying demo storyworld demonstrate ten
of these transmedia aesthetics in action: Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement; Unique
Storyworld Characteristics; World-Centric Narrative Design (with a Human Lens at the Center);
Resonant Simple-Story Myths; Extensible Character Design; Fractal Storytelling and Extensible
Narrative Architecture; Additive Comprehension; Multiple Experience Pathways and
Modularity; Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances; and Collaborative Authorship,
Clear Canon(s) and Multiplicity. Taken together, these transmedia aesthetics help create
beautiful storyworlds that can last for decades across multiple platforms – including screens that
don’t exist yet – and have a meaningful, lasting impact on the future of popular culture and the
real world as well.

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Acknowledgements
What you hold in your hands in the culmination of 13 years’ worth of exploration into the
business, aesthetics and production of transmedia storyworlds, plus 20-odd years’ worth of
obsession with consuming and creating those storyworlds before that, so I’ve got a ton of people
to thank for getting me here.
1
Over the course of the following thousand-plus pages (!) you’ll
meet a number of these characters and hear how they fit into this story, but here goes.
I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to my parents, Fred and Jody Long, for their unending
support in getting me here and for instilling a love for these storyworlds in me from a very, very
young age. That goes for my grandparents too, Ken and Pauline Alexander and Herb and Jean
Long. I love you all.
Thank you to all my closest friends from high school and college, especially my gang of oldest
partners-in-crime Talon Beeson, Nick Bastin, and Jesica Avellone, and the only slightly more
recent Aaron Downs, Emily Leachman, Nick Ferraro, Josh Mason, Ian Millhiser, Mark and Erin
Wilson, Ken Schultz, Shannon Farney, and the rest of the Kenyon gang. My deepest thanks as
well to my greatest teachers from those Ohio days too, including Cindy McCauley, Judy Bridger,
Andy Pessin, Michael Brint, P.F. Kluge, and Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, for their eternal
patience and guidance.
Thank you to my friends and mentors from my first stint in grad school at MIT, including
(obviously) Henry Jenkins, William Uricchio, Frank Espinosa, Chris Weaver, Diana Henderson,
Beth Coleman, Ivan Askwith, Sam Ford, Alec Austin, Parmesh Shahani, Ilya Vedrashko, Joshua
Green, Barry Kudrowitz, Flourish Klink, Nick Montfort, David Edery, Generoso Fierro, Sarah
Wolozin, Philip Tan, Clara Fernandez-Vara, Matthew Weise, Doris Rusch, Mia Consalvo, Jesper
Juul, Rik Eberhardt, Mike Rapa, and the rest of the GAMBIT crew. Thank you also to all of my
fellow travelers from the Convergence Culture Consortium, including Derek Johnson, Derek
Kompare, Rob Kozinets, Marc Ruppel, Nancy Baym, and everyone that used to hang out with us
in Cambridge and beyond.

1
I’m also going to inevitably leave a few people out, so if you don’t see your name here but it should be,
thank you!
Long 28
Thank you to my friends from Microsoft, especially Matt McCloskey, CJ Saretto, Doug
Hebenthal, Deb Moore, Kathleen Mulcahy, Hoop Somuah, Ed Maia, and the rest of the Elias
gang; Eric Nylund, Matt Whiting, Tom Abernathy, Jeff Combos, Ross Berger, Rich Bryant,
Samantha Vick, Dana Fos, Beth Novak, Robert Ferrigno, my now fellow-Ph.D. Tony Elias, and
everyone else from the Narrative Design team, plus our fellow travelers Ken Lobb, Jenna Seiden,
Donald Brinkman, Adam Isgreen, Josh Feldman, William Hodge, Chuck Osieja, Jim Hawk,
Chris Novak, Kevin Lambert, Habib Zargarpour, Kudo Tsunoda, and my other Seattle friends.
Thank you to my friends from USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism,
especially Erin Reilly, Jonathan Taplin, Aninoy Mahapatra, Sophie Madej, Rachelle Meredith,
Francesca Marie Smith, plus BC Biermann, Peter Marx, Gabe Kahn, François Bar, and everyone
else who spent those whirlwind years with us.
Thank you to all my friends from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, especially Holly Willis,
Elizabeth Ramsey, Stacey Patterson, Sonia Seetharaman, Dave Lopez, Vicki Callahan, Scott
Fisher, Andreas Kratky, Tara McPherson, Matt Scott, Sam Roberts, Colin Kelly, Karl Baumann,
Biayna Bogosian, Behnaz Ferahi, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Samantha Gorman, Catherine Griffiths,
Juri Hwang, Noa Kaplan, Adam Lisciewicz, Triton Mobley, Szilvia Ruszev, Clea Waite and
Emilia Yang, and especially Joe Unger, Trisha Williams, Laura Cechanowicz, Brian Cantrell,
and Tony Patrick.
Thank you to all my amazing friends in the transmedia storytelling education and entertainment
industry spaces, especially Melanie Bourdaa, Christy Dena, Flint Dille, Stephen Dinehart IV,
Jeff Gomez, JC Hutchins, Malcolm Murdock, Mike Moon, Angela Ndalianis, Alison Norrington,
Siobhan O’Flynn, Andrea Philips, Andrea Rehn, Sara Thacher, Scott Walker, James Waugh,
Lance Weiler, Jordan Weisman, and everyone else from Storyworld, the Future of Storytelling,
StoryForward, Forward Slash Story, and all the other amazing parties and conversations.
Thank you to the many, many folks over the years who have helped me refine my observations
and best practices into a set of lessons and exercises, especially Prof. Alex Pfeiffer and my
students at Danube University Krems, Prof. Novak and my students at Woodbury University,
and Prof. Andrea Rehn and my students at Whittier College. An extra-special thanks goes out
Long 29
again to Prof. Talon Beeson, and his students at Austin Peay State University for their
spectacular read-through of Spookshow and the gift of giving my characters their voices.
Thank you to my wonderful thesis committee, Alex McDowell, Richard Lemarchand, Jeff
Watson, Kiki Benzon, and perhaps most of all for all his years (and years) of guidance and
friendship, Henry Jenkins.
Of course, my deepest, most heartfelt thanks go to my amazing wife Laura and our brilliant
daughter Zoe, who are both their own kind of magical. I love you both with all my heart. Thank
you for your unending support and amazingly inexhaustible patience. We did it!
Long 30
Introduction: One Life in Early Transmedia Storytelling
Let me tell you a story.
I was born in 1977, so the dominant mythologies of my childhood were Star Wars, G.I. Joe,
Transformers, Masters of the Universe, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This was something
of a challenge, because most of these storyworlds were doled out primarily through cartoons, and
I grew up so far out in Middle of Nowhere, Ohio that we didn’t get cable TV until I was in junior
high.
However, I did enjoy a double-dose of serious luck: one, I was not only an only kid, on my
mother’s side I was also an only grandkid; and two, those grandparents lived in town, so they did
have cable – and since they lived only a few blocks away from my elementary school and both
my parents had jobs, several times a week I’d be plunked down in front of Grandma and
Grandpa’s TV for a glorious hour or two. I’d eagerly drink in the latest exciting adventure of
Autobots versus Decepticons or G.I. Joe versus Cobra, surrounded by my action figures and (in
perhaps a tidy bit of personal foreshadowing) the character biography “file cards” that I’d
obsessively clipped from the cardboard packages of each figure. To me these toys weren’t just
lumps of colored plastic – they were characters whose secrets, powers, relationships and endless
adventures I followed with utter devotion. Sure, I also loved the books of Greek mythology and
other kids’ storybooks that my grandparents kept around for me, but these plastic characters with
their stories on after-school TV were noisy and vibrant and still unfolding. These stories were
alive.
The flaw in this scheme was that my mom only worked three days a week. As a result, I only
caught some episodes of these shows, which left mysterious gaps in the story – especially the
multi-part story arcs which the showrunners seemed so cruelly fond of running.
2
This left me
endlessly starving for more information, and I’d fiercely scavenge for and hoard any additional
bits I could get. Imagine my joy when I first discovered tie-in novels for each of these series at

2
Oh, to have had a TiVo in 1982! Hell, I would have settled for a VCR.
Long 31
Waldenbooks, and the Marvel comics at my local comic shop.
3
I devoured as many of these as I
could find, but it wasn’t long before I noticed that something weird was going on.
The more of these stories I consumed across multiple media, the more discrepancies began to
appear. For example, two of the Transformers in my collection were a blue evil Decepticon
named Frenzy and a red evil Decepticon named Rumble, both of whom transformed into audio
cassettes⁠ and were, aside from their color, nearly identical. The character bio cards from their
packages clearly depicted Frenzy as blue and Rumble as red – but on the TV show, Frenzy was
red and Rumble was blue. There was no explanation for this swap, it just was. Later, when I
discovered Marvel’s Transformers comics, Frenzy was back to being blue and Rumble was back
to being red!
4
A tiny discrepancy, sure, but it still made me stop and wonder – in terms I
wouldn’t learn until much later, it disrupted my suspension of disbelief, and raised my sense of
transmedia resistance.
5

Things got both better and worse when Masters of the Universe, Transformers, and G.I. Joe each
had – wonder of wonders! – full feature-length movies released in the summers of 1985, 1986
and 1987 respectively. The stories told on the big screen were bigger, bolder, more epically
awesome than anything they ever did on TV. For example, the original Transformers TV show
featured an endless series of clashes between the heroic Optimus Prime’s Autobots and the
villainous Megatron’s Decpticons. Prime stopped Megatron every week, the status quo was
maintained, and all was right in the world – but very little ever changed...
…Until August 8th, 1986.
That was the day that kids across America flocked to theaters for the opening of The
Transformers: The Movie – and then, about 90 minutes later, we emerged traumatized by the
unthinkable events that transpired in the film. In it, Megatron successfully kills Optimus Prime
(but is himself mortally wounded in the fight), Optimus is replaced by the newer, younger

3
Weirdly, I didn’t discover the Marvel G.I. Joe and Transformers comics until much later. Even then, it
was difficult to find comics with any regularity in rural Ohio.
4
I wasn’t the only one hung up on the “Frenzy is blue, Rumble is red” phenomenon - just ask my fellow
transmedia geek J.C. Hutchins, or do a quick web search for ‘FIBRIR’ or ‘FIRRIB’.
5
Much more on Transmedia Resistance in Part II.
Long 32
Rodimus Prime, and Megatron is rebuilt into the sleeker, even more menacing Galvatron. By the
end of the movie, the planet-sized villain Unicron is not only killed, his head is blown clean off
and becomes a grim new moon for the Transformers’ home planet. To eight-year-old me, this
was some serious stuff. In less than two hours, scores of the characters that I’d grown up with
had been mercilessly slaughtered, only to be replaced by a new generation of robotic heroes and
villains.
Compared to the usual after-school episodes at Grandma’s house, this was mind-blowing.
Perhaps even more impressive, though, was what came a few months later: the TV show picked
up where the movie left off. When the Transformers cartoon returned in the fall of 1986, the
retooled opening sequence featured Unicron’s bodiless head swooshing around in orbit, a clear
message that things had changed. Again, this was revolutionary; although the overall quality of
the show is prime fodder for geeky debates, for my money some of the most memorable episodes
of the show’s entire run dealt with the fallout from the events in the film.
6

And yet, and yet… The little discrepancies that I’d noticed before had grown exponentially
worse. Not only did the TV show now reflect the events in the movie, the comics did too – but
they handled it differently. Unicron showed up in Marvel’s Transformers comics, but not in the
same way – the plot unfolded differently, characters that died on the TV show were still running
around in the comics, and new characters showed up in the comics that never appeared on the
TV show. Frenzy being blue in the comics and in the toys but red on the TV show – that my
young mind could work around. But Optimus Prime being dead on the TV show and in the
movie but somehow still being alive in the comics? What?
Even as a kid I knew something was up. Different things were happening in different media,
suggesting that perhaps there were things you could only do in a particular medium (or at least
could be done significantly better in that medium); sometimes the story flowed from one
medium to another but sometimes it didn’t; and all of this had something to do with the money
being shelled out for these little brightly-colored lumps of plastic and metal called action figures.

6
For children’s television, the “Starscream’s Ghost”, “Ghost in the Machine” and “Return of Optimus
Prime” episodes were terrifying.
Long 33
I also knew that I was really confused by all of this, which suggested that whatever was going on,
it could have been done a whole lot better.

Fast forward twenty-odd years. As I grew up my passion for stories and the cultural,
technological and financial ecosystems surrounding storytelling only increased, first through the
Integrated Program in Humane Studies (think experimental proto-digital humanities) at Kenyon
College in the late 1990s, then through a series of jobs involving writing, design, publishing, web
design, programming and information architecture. I spent a lot of time thinking about what was
written, how it was written, why it was written, and how multiple pieces fit together.
By 2004, I was working as a freelance interactive designer in Chicago when I stumbled across an
article in the MIT Technology Review by one Dr. Henry Jenkins. In the article, Jenkins described
something called “transmedia storytelling”, or stories that flowed from one medium to another.
7
I
was ecstatic: this guy had put his finger on exactly what had been gnawing at my brain since I
was a kid. I probably read that article a dozen times before I screwed up the courage to send
Jenkins an email to express my appreciation for the piece and what it meant to me. Much to my
astonishment, he wrote back, and we began exchanging emails on the topic. The more I learned
about him, the more impressed I became by his brilliant work in media studies, fan culture, and a
dizzying array of other topics. Most impressively to me, Jenkins was the co-founder of a
program called Comparative Media Studies (CMS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and after digging around a little, I was flabbergasted that such a program existed. Here was a
program that was doing precisely what I’d been obsessed with for years – examining how
different media evolve over time, how content is affected by that evolution, what you can do in
one medium that you can’t in another, how new technology was impacting the future of media
and storytelling… All of it!
I was simultaneously elated and filled with despair. This was exactly what I wanted to study, to
understand, to do for a living – but it was at MIT, for crying out loud! Sure, I was a geek,
obsessed with the future and how technology and storytelling were co-evolving, but except for

7
Jenkins 2003.
Long 34
some basic PHP, ActionScript and, well, BASIC, at the time I couldn’t code my way out of a
paper bag. I was going to apply to MIT? English-and-Philosophy major me? Was I nuts?
I decided to fly out to Boston to attend an open house that CMS was holding for prospective
graduate students anyway. I sat and listened, fascinated by all the wonderful, crazy things the
students and faculty were getting up to. Afterwards, I went up to Jenkins to at least shake his
hand and introduce myself. “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Geoff Long,” I said
awkwardly. “I wrote you those e-mails about your transmedia storytelling piece…”
“Of course I remember you!” Jenkins said with a broad smile. “Why didn’t you tell me you were
coming?”
That did it. The next thing I knew I was sending in my application, and then I was (miracle of
miracles!) accepted into the program. The next two years were, exactly like the old MIT joke,
like drinking from a fire hose. I took amazing classes, met astonishing people (both students and
faculty), stayed up until the wee hours working my ass off – and I loved every minute of it. I had
the pleasure of being there in 2006 when Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture, which contained a
chapter-length expansion of his theories on transmedia storytelling, was published and took off.
Along with my fellow grad students Sam Ford, Ivan Askwith, Alec Austin and Parmesh Shahani,
and with the guidance of then-postdoc Joshua Green, I helped Jenkins boot up the Convergence
Culture Consortium (C3), a research project that extended the work that he had done in his book,
applying his theories to a number of real-world projects and issues.
8
After I graduated in 2007 I
stuck around for another three years, first as the Communications Director for the CMS program,
and then as a researcher and Communications Director for the second research group I helped
boot up at MIT, Philip Tan’s Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.
Most importantly, I had the immense pleasure of working with Jenkins on my Master’s thesis, a
185-page beast
9
called “Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim

8
Among other things, I designed the C3 logo and website, wrote a white paper on mobile storytelling
where I first began beating the drum of story-over-system (or, Rule 1: Don’t Suck) and eventually wrote a
white paper on that evolved into “How to Ride a Lion.”
9
For a CMS Master’s thesis, 185 pages was a behemoth. As of this writing, the Ph.D. thesis you hold in
your hands is on track to clock in at over 1200. One of these days I’ve got to find myself an editor.
Long 35
Henson Company”.
10
In it, I examined a really interesting problem that the Hensons were
tackling at the time: after having sold the Muppets to Disney, the Jim Henson Company needed
alternate showcase intellectual properties (IPs) to serve as revenue streams. They dove into their
back catalog and resurfaced with the two dark fantasy films that Jim Henson had made with
fantasy artist Brian Froud in the 1980s, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. In an attempt to
resuscitate these IPs, introduce them to a new generation and gauge interest in them before
investing in creating feature film sequels, the Hensons did a deal with DC Comics’ sub-label
Tokyopop to create new prequels and sequels – or transmedia extensions – to these films in
manga.
In the abstract, this was a great idea. Manga is a very low-cost medium, and it was a “native
medium” for countless Pokémon-obsessed Generation Y kids. In execution, though, this proved
to be difficult, largely because of how the worldbuilding done by Henson and Froud differed so
radically between the two films. In The Dark Crystal, Henson and Froud spent years developing
the fictional world of Thra, complete with its own history, culture, art, and language – in effect,
doing much the same thing that J.R.R. Tolkien did with Lord of the Rings. By contrast, Labyrinth
was done much faster, and felt like an extended David Bowie music video. The dreamlike nature
of Labyrinth, especially the suggestion that the whole thing really was a dream (as implied by an
early panning shot across the protagonist’s bedroom, which includes toys of nearly all the main
characters we meet later on in the film) made Labyrinth more difficult to extend into a full
transmedia franchise.
Both films actually were transmedia stories at the time of their release, as both were
accompanied by companion art books, but even these suffered from the same troubles. The
World of the Dark Crystal was a magnificent prequel that filled in the backstory of the witch
Alghra, but Goblins of Labyrinth was a Monty Python-esque comical catalogue of the goblins
that flitted briefly across the screen.
11
In short, The Dark Crystal was rich with multiple “hooks”
for further explorations into its fictional world, but those hooks were largely missing in
Labyrinth – suggesting that these hooks, or negative spaces, might be a very real characteristic of

10
Yes, I earned a Master’s degree from MIT by writing about Muppets.
11
Which makes complete sense, since the screenwriter for Labyrinth and the co-author of the book was
Monty Python’s Terry Jones.
Long 36
successful vast intertextual stories. This became the primary argument of my master’s thesis –
that such hooks could be deliberately and strategically designed into the experience from the
beginning to increase the odds of a storyworld becoming a successful long-term entertainment
franchise.
For a Master’s thesis, the beastie made some noise. Between this and the continuation of my
research that I was doing at GAMBIT – looking specifically at the role of video games in
transmedia franchises and how transmedia franchises could be successfully built out with video
games as the central ‘tentpoles,’ with the guidance of Philip, Matthew Weise, Clara Fernández-
Vara, Doris Rusch, Mia Consalvo, Rik Eberhardt, Mike Rapa, and the rest of our amazing team –
I spent the next couple of years flying around the world giving lectures, attending conferences,
and meeting tons of interesting people. This culminated in a very bizarre conversation in late
2009, at the fourth Futures of Entertainment Conference at MIT. I had just finished chairing a
panel on Purefold, Ridley Scott’s transmedia franchise attempt to extend the feel of Blade
Runner, when two gentlemen came up to me.
One of them reached out to shake my hand. “You’re Geoff Long, aren’t you?”
“Depends on who’s asking,” I replied, suddenly feeling like I was in a spy movie.
“We’re from Microsoft, and we really like your work,” the other said. “Would you like to grab a
coffee and talk?”
Thus began the third major impact that transmedia storytelling had on my life. These two guys
were Matt McCloskey and CJ Saretto, and they worked in Doug Hebenthal’s future-of-media
think tank for Microsoft’s CTO/CXO J Allard, who had been one of the big brains behind the
Xbox 360. In the fall of 2009, I began consulting for them, writing white papers on transmedia
experiences, and in the spring of 2010, I was invited to interview for a full-time job. The next
thing I knew, my wife Laura and I were moving from Boston to Seattle.
My first year at Microsoft was spent working with multiple teams, talking to anyone and
everyone who would listen about transmedia entertainment and co-authoring a series of over 40
white papers on transmedia experiences. I had the pleasure of working for a string of amazing
people, including Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and “the godfather of cloud computing”
Long 37
Ray Ozzie, for whom I explored the idea of transmedia storytelling as entertainment native to the
cloud. In the spring of 2011 I moved over to Microsoft Studios, where, with air cover from Matt
Whiting, Eric Nylund and I booted up the Narrative Design Team, an experimental group
chartered to create transmedia-ready storyworlds that would flow across Microsoft’s entire
entertainment platform for a decade or more, including on screens that didn’t exist yet. By this
time, my research into the unique aesthetics of successful transmedia franchises had exploded,
growing from the one key concept of negative space that I described in my Master’s thesis to
dozens of tools, tricks and techniques being developed by storytellers (especially in the video
games industry) to guide audiences across media and deliver entertainment experiences that are
greater than the sum of their parts. Using those tools, I helped craft new transmedia storyworlds,
aided in the design of transmedia platforms like SmartGlass, the Xbox One and HoloLens,
consulted on projects like Adera and State of Decay, advised friends on the Halo team and in
Microsoft Research,
12
and evaluated numerous storyworlds being pitched to Microsoft. Two of
my key projects with the Narrative Design team – a “digital interactive graphic novel” connected
to the Xbox One launch title Ryse: Son of Rome and the game-film hybrid Quantum Break –
seemed to prove that transmedia storytelling had truly come into its own as a full-fledged
medium.
And yet, and yet… Somehow, it still hadn’t.
Like Luke Skywalker returning to Yoda to finish his training, I left Microsoft after three years to
follow Henry Jenkins to the University of Southern California. From mid-2013 through the end
of 2015 I served as technical director, creative director and a research fellow for Jonathan
Taplin’s Annenberg Innovation Lab in USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and
Journalism, for which Henry served as an advisor. Working with Jon, Erin Reilly, Francesca
Marie Smith, Aninoy Mahapatra, Sophie Madej, Rachelle Meredith and a host of other brilliant
people, I dove into where I saw storytelling heading next, particularly in such “New Screens” as
augmented reality, virtual reality, the Internet of Things and their connected world, wearable
devices, and 3D printing. I also explored the “New Creators and Makers,” those members of the
so-called “YouTube Generation” who were using self-publishing, funding platforms like Patreon
and Kickstarter, social media and YouTube to forge new careers for themselves, a kind of

12
With the help of the fantastic and brilliant Donald Brinkman!
Long 38
widespread punk-rock DIY approach to being an artist instead of being beholden to the
traditional gatekeepers and monolithic media companies. I also assisted Erin Reilly in her
exploration into what she called ‘Leveraging Engagement,’ a research project based on the work
of my aforementioned friend and MIT cohort-mate Ivan Askwith that reframed audience
modeling from traditional four-quadrant demographics (male/female, young/old) to audience
motivations, yielding a much more nuanced model for constructing experiences to appeal to
disparate forms of enjoyment. While doing the research that would eventually be released in The
Edison Project, I saw that all the pieces were in place for transmedia storytelling to emerge as
the future of entertainment, but something was still missing.
By 2015 the Marvel Cinematic Universe was in full swing – but while The Avengers and its sub-
franchises were blowing the doors off box office records, and while Disney and Lucasfilm were
doing amazing things in coordinating the disparate components of Star Wars into a unified whole,
there were still major problems. Things didn’t hold together as well as they should. Licensing
deals done before Disney acquired Marvel kept the X-Men out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
and relegated to their own sub-universe over at FOX
13
– which soon resulted in the notable
downplaying of mutants like the X-Men in the Marvel comics universe and an increased
emphasis on ‘Inhumans,’ which Disney could fully own and promote in such components of
their transmedia empire as the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show on ABC and its eventual (if
short-lived) spinoff Inhumans. However, even the connections within that very empire were
weakening. Whispers of personality clashes between the creative leads on different components
resulted in strained connections between parts of the story, such as the rumored brotherly tension
between Joss Whedon, who killed off Agent Coulson in his blockbuster film The Avengers, and
Jed Whedon, who brought Coulson back to star in his own Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show. As
of this writing, even though Coulson became the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. at one point, the main
characters in The Avengers still don’t know, or seem to care, that he’s alive – which is shocking,
since his death was what got them to agree to assemble into the Avengers in the first place.
Further, while major IPs like The Avengers were being used to promote emerging media like
virtual reality – one early sizzle demo for Samsung’s Gear VR headsets put audiences into

13
I should add here that I’ve done consulting work for both FOX and Disney, and I have friends doing
amazing work at both companies.
Long 39
Stark’s lab in the Avengers tower and let them poke around – by the end of 2015 no virtual
reality or augmented reality components to date had truly stood on their own as valuable
additions to a transmedia storyworld, at least not at the level as the Enter the Matrix video game
did back in 2003.
I began to suspect that for transmedia storytelling to truly start realizing its full potential, what
was needed was a better understanding of how storyworlds could be engineered to support
multiple connected stories. I also began to suspect that the next wave of fantastic transmedia
storytelling would come from indies, as they would (theoretically) be subject to less of the big-
budget and big-personality clashes inherent in producing storyworlds at the level of Disney or
Microsoft. For transmedia storytelling to evolve, it needed a better, clearer understanding of how
transmedia storytelling worked. If we approached transmedia storytelling as a design problem,
then anyone form a small indie creator to a massive Hollywood super-studio could create better
transmedia stories. Further, understanding not just the ‘sticking points’ of design that audiences
experienced while navigating such transmedia storyworlds was only half of it – we also need to
better understand why audiences put in that extra effort to jump from one medium to the next,
and in so doing better learn how to reward them for doing so. I quickly realized that creating
better transmedia stories wasn’t just a design problem, it was a game design problem.
In the fall of 2015, I began my PhD in Media Arts + Practice (MA+P) at USC’s School of
Cinematic Arts with Jenkins as my mentor and thesis advisor, and in January of 2016 I became
the Creative Director for USC’s World Building Media Lab under Alex McDowell, the
production designer for Fight Club, Man of Steel and Minority Report. In these two capacities I
plunged headlong into this research question. If we treat transmedia story experience design as a
kind of game design, how does that change how we think about how we make worlds? How we
design characters? How we design the connections between multiple disparate components so
that the process of “discover, collect, costume, and react” (as I’ll get more into later), isn’t just
easier, but more fun?
Of course, you still need to have compelling characters and you still need to have engaging plots,
but there are a number of characteristics common to many successful transmedia storyworlds.
This suggests that, just as a medium like video games combines the aesthetics of the multiple
media utilized within it (the imagery and cinematography of video, the compositional beauty of
Long 40
music, etc.) with its own unique aesthetics (in games’ case, interactivity) to become viewed as its
own medium, transmedia storytelling should be seen as a medium in and of itself, with its own
unique set of aesthetics.
I began my research in earnest, assembling notes I’d generated across my life in early transmedia
storytelling. I culled insights from amazing academics and storytellers who had been grappling
with these questions – in some cases, long before I was born – and as I went, I engaged in
numerous conversations with the faculty and my fellow graduate students in MA+P. With Holly
Willis, Vicki Callahan, Biayna Bogosian, Behnaz Farahi, Samantha Gorman, Catherine Griffiths,
Juri Hwang, Noa Kaplan, Triton Mobley, Szilvia Ruszev, Clea Waite, and especially Andreas
Kratky, I grappled with whether or not what I was doing could be considered ‘art.’ With Jeff
Watson, Kiki Benzon, Adam Liszkiewicz and Emilia Yang, I wrestled with the sociopolitical
ramifications of my work, and what responsibility transmedia storytellers and world builders had
to the larger culture. With Scott Fisher, Jen Stein and Todd Furmanski, I considered and
reconsidered and re-reconsidered the possibilities of emerging platforms. With Alex McDowell,
Joe Unger, Trisha Williams, Brian Cantrell, Laura Cechanowicz, Brandon Cahoon, and Karl
Baumann, I poked and prodded at the meaning(s) of “world building”, its power and possible
techniques. Through it all, I kept coming back and checking in with Henry Jenkins to share my
findings, compare notes and – always – get a new list of stuff I should be reading!
Then came the fall of 2016.
Much like everyone else in the program, the 2016 Presidential election had a galvanizing effect
on me – but perhaps in different ways than for the rest of my cohort. Coming from that small
town in Ohio, I struggled with the shocked and horrified comments coming from my more blue-
state friends: “I had no idea Middle America was still so racist!” “How could the Midwest be so
sexist?” “How could this have happened?” I knew it wasn’t so simple. I knew that, yes,
conservative areas of Middle America can frequently still be very xenophobic, but I also knew
that economics and the uneven rates of financial recovery between cities and small towns did
play a very large role. I understood why people retreat to more conservative, xenophobic
positions when their worlds are upended, when their social and economic standings are
jeopardized, when the change that they see happening is perceived as a threat instead of an
opportunity, generating fear instead of generating hope.
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With that in mind, I began crafting a transmedia storyworld, something that would kick the tires
of my theories about what made some transmedia storyworlds particularly ‘beautiful,’ that is,
particularly effective in both generating revenue and cultural impact. The resulting work,
Spookshow, is the most meaningful work I’ve ever produced. It’s – obviously – a story about fear,
and at its most superficial level it’s a young adult entertainment franchise that’s a Neil
Gaiman/Guillermo del Toro/Mike Mignola-style mashup of Harry Potter and Stranger Things,
with strong elements of Carnevale and The House with a Clock in its Walls thrown in for flavor.
There are ghosts, and monsters, and clockwork automatons, and kids that run away to join the
circus. Yet, if you scratch the surface just a little you’ll find that it’s also loaded with elements
that are resonant with what’s going on in America as I’m writing this. Spookshow asks what
would have happened if, in 1917, the Central Powers in Germany had discovered that the
witches and wizards from the fairy tales were real and living deep in the Black Forest. What if
those magicians sent the magical equivalent of an atomic bomb against the United States? As
McDowell taught in his worldbuilding classes, out of that central “what if” came a long, complex
set of stories that dealt with the sociopolitical fallout from that “Great Disaster”. I crafted a world
in which, in the face of this new great unknown, people retreated to religion – and the religions
of the world banded together into one unified front to fight it. They won, but at great cost. The
church – now one Church – was inevitably corrupted by human greed for power, and the radical
Othering of anyone with any magical gifts began, a fascistic New Inquisition to cement the
Church’s power through fear.
When I was still a fairly little kid, I was laughed out of Sunday School by some classmates for
believing in the Big Bang. In that moment, I saw firsthand what it looked like when religion used
faith as a weapon against intellectualism and curiosity. Yet I also knew that this was complicated,
because my Grandpa Alexander taught the adults’ class at Sunday School and he always told me
how the Bible was a set of metaphors and moral guidelines, and how the church served as a place
of refuge, kindness, learning and compassion. Both were (and are!) true, which is why it’s so
important that, even in times when the darker side manages to gain control, those who still
remember the lighter side are willing to stand up and fight.
I took those memories and wove them into Spookshow, making the corrupted Church the
“villain,” but having one of my story’s heroes be a man of faith who works to bring down the
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Church in order to restore it to its former glory. My other heroes are magicians, members of the
persecuted class in society living in secret, but before long we discover that their role in the
Great Disaster was also not their fault, and our young magic-wielding heroine sets out to put
things right. To complicate things still further, around the middle of the second act we discover
that the Great Disaster actually ripped open a hole in the wall between our world and a world of
raw natural magic, and the resulting wave of power reformatted everything west of the
Mississippi into a magical Great Wilderness, in effect undoing all the European colonization and
replacing everything (both European and Native American) with ‘monsters’. (It’s not the most
subtle metaphor for the 21st century American debate over immigration, but that’s kind of the
point.) There’s lots of magical battles, but the lines between good and evil grow increasingly
blurred, and by the end the great climax is not so much one side winning over the other as it is a
form of synthesis between what came before and what better future could be built by merging
both worlds.
Formally, Spookshow draws very deliberately on the same Campbellian monomyth approach
that powers Star Wars, but applied in a more complicated and more contemporary fashion. This
“simple story” approach was just one of ten “transmedia aesthetics” that I developed out of
everything I’d learned since I began my master’s work at MIT 13 years ago.
14
The “theory and
practice” approach at the heart of MA+P enabled me to synthesize elements from my entire life
in early transmedia storytelling together into what you hold in your hands: a set of transmedia
aesthetics for ‘beautiful’ transmedia storyworlds that can help transmedia storytellers at any scale
– indie or blockbuster – to make their creations better, and a sketch of the Spookshow storyworld
that demonstrates not only how to implement those best practices, but how to think about
whether the story you’re telling is one that needs to be told. In the pages that follow, there are a
lot of very powerful tools. It’s critical that you take the time to consider the long-term
ramifications of the worlds you build with them, and what impact they’ll have on the culture.
There’s a lot of stuff in here about how to make those worlds fun, and how to keep your
audiences wanting more, but myths are our most basic programming language for hacking
culture.

14
That ‘unlucky’ number 13 reoccurs everywhere in the architecture of Spookshow.
Long 43
As someone’s wise old uncle once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It is my
hope that the tools you will find in these pages will help you build rich, wonderful transmedia
storyworlds that will resonate with audiences around the world, but always be sure to take the
time to think through what your work means, and what it will do once it’s unleashed upon the
world – because the art of worldbuilding is, at its most elemental, a technique for influencing the
future of the world around you.

What Is This Book, And Who Is It For?
This book collects the ten biggest, most powerful, and most effective of these transmedia
aesthetics and presents them using a combined “comparative media studies” and “media arts and
practice” model, combining research with implementation in hopes of creating more scholarly
creatives and more creative scholars.
Part I, “What is Transmedia Storytelling?”, is a quick contextualization, what we called “level
setting” back at Microsoft. In this section, I’ll sketch out a rough picture of what the current
transmedia storytelling landscape looks like, what kinds of people are playing in it, and lay out
some working definitions.
Part II, “Designing Transmedia Stories,” brings a user experience design model to the exercise of
designing transmedia experiences. In the first part, “Transmedia Resistance and the Four Stages
of Transmedia Experiences”, I argue that all transmedia experiences share a similar four-stage
process – discover, collect, consume and react – and that it’s crucial to think of this process as
the thrumming engine at the heart of each project. Much like any other type of engine, of course,
there is some inherent resistance, which runs the risk of dragging your users’ experiences down
and, in the worst-case scenarios, killing its energy altogether. Overcoming that resistance is
where transmedia aesthetics come into play, to both reduce friction and increase energy. In the
second part, “Transmedia Storytelling as Game Design,” I make my argument for, well, how
transmedia experience design should be considered as a kind of game design. Henry Jenkins
described transmedia stories as a kind of collective intelligence game in Convergence Culture,
and Christy Dena has a spectacular body of work looking at the game mechanics of transmedia
Long 44
experiences, but I look deeper into the narrative mechanics of ludic fiction – or stories that have
playful game-like mechanics built into them already. By bringing Jenkins and Dena together
with ‘literary gaming’ scholars like Peter Hutchinson and Ingrid Ensslin, a clearer vision of how
transmedia story experiences might be designed begins to emerge. The third part, “Creating the
Narrative Design Document,” throws into sharp relief the function of the Narrative Design team
I co-founded at Microsoft Studios. A Narrative Design team, and a narrative design document,
isn’t just a bunch of writers. They’re experience designers, crafting blueprints for how disparate
components of transmedia story experiences fit together so they’re greater than the sum of their
parts, appealing to disparate audience types by understanding disparate audience motivations and
designing the experiences accordingly, and sketching out production schedules and release
cadences to deliver the best ongoing user experiences as possible, over a decade or more, across
all screens – including those that don’t exist yet. This chapter describes one possible form such a
Narrative Design Document might take – one part story bible, one part game design document –
and describes how it might be used by corporate or indie transmedia storytellers.
Part III, “10 Aesthetics of Successful Transmedia Stories,” is where the rubber meets the road,
identifying and explaining ten transmedia aesthetics, the history and theory behind each one,
how each one can be applied to developing or critiquing a transmedia story, and how I use it in
my own work. Each chapter begins with an exploration of a transmedia aesthetic and some
examples of transmedia storyworlds that exemplify it, to understand what the aesthetic is and
why it’s important. This is followed by a suggested model for how storytellers might use the
aesthetic in their own transmedia storyworld, then a second suggested model for how critics,
producers, publishers and academics might evaluate how well a particular aesthetic is used
within a transmedia storyworld, and then a short case study on how I used that aesthetic in
developing my own transmedia storyworld, Spookshow.
Part IV, “Transmedia Mechanics,” makes a brief foray into the technological underpinnings that
might power the next generation of transmedia storytelling experiences. As all media
increasingly become digital and connected, the term ‘transmedia’ is quickly becoming irrelevant.
However, even when ‘transmedia’ becomes just media, these notions of intertextual connectivity
will still stick around – and being digitally connected will further cement these components into
Long 45
unified experiences that customize themselves accordingly to user preferences and consumption
patterns.
Part V, "The Art of the Pitch," collects a few best practices for pitching vast transmedia
storyworlds – including why you shouldn't pitch them as "vast transmedia storyworlds." This
section draws together techniques from my time at MIT, my time at Microsoft, and my time with
the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and runs them through the filter of transmedia storytelling,
including how and why Narrative Designers should structure the pitch like a story itself, the
power of design fictions (including why they're important for executives who don't have the time
to read), the power of one-page executive summaries (and why they're different from design
fictions), and why pitch bibles are important and not Narrative Design Documents.
Finally, all of the exercises from each chapter are pulled together into two tools, which you'll
find in the Appendices: a transmedia story scorecard that producers, publishers, critics and
academics can use to evaluate the quality of an existing transmedia storyworld, and a multi-step
transmedia storytelling framework that storytellers can use to build much more engaging
transmedia storytelling experiences and the Narrative Design Documents that will serve as their
blueprints.
Note that the ten Transmedia Aesthetics included here aren’t a complete and definitive checklist
– a successful transmedia franchise doesn’t have to have all ten, nor is including all ten a surefire
recipe for success. A franchise could incorporate all ten, but one of them could be a catastrophic
failure and ruin the lot, or the franchise might have a really great TV show but a weak closely-
bound video game could drag down the whole thing, or – most commonly, and most tragically –
it could have all of these elements intact but there’s no beating human heart at the center of the
story, so the whole thing feels lifeless.
Also, as is so often the case with the arts (especially the commercial popular arts), theory is easy
but practice is incredibly hard – especially making sure that you have a great story. Rule one is
always, and will always be, don’t suck. I can’t make every story not suck – but I can give
storytellers ways to take a story that doesn’t suck and prime it for success as a vast transmedia
franchise, and give scholars, critics, publishers and producers ways to to make educated guesses
about how well a storyworld might succeed as a transmedia franchise.
Long 46
Conversely, does a story with these ten characteristics only succeed if it erects a vast transmedia
franchise around it? Of course not – as you’ll soon see, most of these elements are present in the
first components of vast transmedia franchise successes like Star Wars or Assassin’s Creed, and
as a result those first components are better, more engaging, more enthralling stories even when
taken alone. This, of course, makes it that much more likely that audiences want to come back
for more stories in that world – which, at the end of the day, is what determines whether or not
any kind of vast storyworld will flourish or fail.
Finally, I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret. As much as I throw around the word “transmedia”
in this document, in reality many of the best practices that I describe here are also applicable to
storyworlds that exist in multiple components in a single medium. The meta-game of having
audiences discover, collect, consume and react to disparate pieces of a story across multiple
shows in a single storyworld (like ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Inhumans, the Defenders
franchise on Netflix, the BBC’s Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures and Class,
or CBS’ JAG, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, and NCIS: New Orleans) faces many of the same
challenges, and thus benefits from many of the same strategies and aesthetics. The trick, as
always, is to create storyworlds worthy of devotion, understand what your audiences want and
why, and present these storyworlds in ways that are fun and engaging for your multiple
audiences. Hence, this book on the game design of transmedia storyworlds.

In a West Coast State of Mind
Some among you might protest that I shortchange alternate reality games in this book, opting to
focus on large-scale franchises instead.
15
This is true – I do. This is because I’m a pretty “West
Coast” kind of guy in this regard, despite my years in Boston. To clarify, let me quote transmedia
storyteller Andrea Phillips’ excellent A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling:
There’s a divide between what some wags call West Coast versus East Coast
transmedia. West Coast-style transmedia, more commonly called Hollywood or

15
I do talk about alternate reality games, as a matter of fact, but I don’t go deep into depth on them until
the “leveraged affordances” chapter in part II.
Long 47
franchise transmedia, consists of multiple big pieces of media: feature films,
video games, that kind of thing. It’s grounded in big-business commercial
storytelling. The stories in these projects are interwoven, but lightly; each piece
can be consumed on its own, and you’ll still come away with the idea that you
were given a complete story.
16

A great example of this would be Star Wars, where multiple films, books, TV series, and so on
combine to tell the long-ago history of a galaxy far, far away. Both new franchises, like Avatar,
and reboots of old ones, like Tron and Transformers, are increasingly embracing this approach.
On the other end of the spectrum, East Coast transmedia tends to be more interactive, and much
more web-centric. It overlaps heavily with the traditions of independent film, theater, and
interactive art. These projects make heavy use of social media, and are often run once over a set
period of time rather than persisting forever. The plot is so tightly woven between media that you
might not fully understand what’s going on if you don’t actively seek out multiple pieces of the
story.
For our example here, consider Lance Weiler’s indie film experience Pandemic, which
incorporated a live scavenger hunt, a short film, comic, Twitter feeds, and more, all unfolding at
the Sundance Film Festival over a few action-packed days.
If you, like me, are more West Coast than East Coast, then this book is definitely for you. As I
described in the first part of this introduction, I’ve been a “big franchise” geek since I was a kid,
and although I hugely respect and admire the ARG community and the groundbreaking work
being done there, there are other, much better books out there (like Phillips’!) that will happily
take you down that particular rabbit hole.
17

16
Philips 2012, pp. 13-14. It’s also worth noting that the whole “East Coast versus West Coast” thing
began as a joke from transmedia’s merry pranksters Steve Peters and the dearly missed Brian Clark.
Peters and Clark were mocking the “rivalry” emerging in our community between these two camps,
likening it to the “war” between East Coast and West Coast rappers.
17
Don’t get me wrong - hopefully there will be some insights of value to the East Coast crowd in these
pages as well! I’ve just got more LA than NYC in my DNA., so to speak.
Long 48
That said, a bit of research reveals that the West Coast and East Coast schools of transmedia
storytelling aren’t as far apart as one might think. The “little blue arrows” that connect the
components in ARGs or franchises, which represent the four steps of “discover, collect, consume
and react” an audience member must take as they move through the intertextual experience, are
mostly the same. As such, designers of ARGs or other East Coast-style storytellers should also
find just as much value in this book as us sunglasses-wearing and convertible-driving West Coast
types.

Transform and Roll Out
Ready to go? If this is the beginning of your own life in transmedia storytelling, Part I will help
bring you up to speed with a few words on history and terminology. If you’re already familiar
with transmedia storytelling, you may want to skip straight to part II, Designing Transmedia
Stories, which provides some useful models for how to think about how to design transmedia
experiences to make them as frictionless and accessible as possible. If you think you’ve got that
under control, feel free to jump straight to the power tools and flip to Part III, 10 Aesthetics of
Successful Transmedia Stories, or Part IV, Transmedia Mechanics.
Before you go on, though, I want to thank you for picking up this book and giving these
transmedia aesthetics some thought. Transmedia storytelling as a whole really is finally coming
into its own as a medium, and as all media continue to become digital and everything continues
to become increasingly digitally connected, and as transmedia storytelling just becomes
storytelling, all of this is on the precipice of another major evolution.
18

Whatever comes next, I hope this book and the tools it contains will lead to greater transmedia
storyworlds, experiences, and scholarship for all of us.
Onward!

18
A fitting image, given the importance of Pokémon as a definitive transmedia storytelling experience for
Generation Y.
Long 49
I. What is Transmedia Storytelling?
19

In his January 2003 article in the MIT Technology Review, Henry Jenkins described how the
growth of a new form of entertainment was being fostered by increases in:
• the complexity that audiences expect from their entertainment,
• the feasibility of sharing digital assets across multiple media forms, and
• the entertainment industry’s insatiable hunger for wildly profitable multi-media
franchises.
As Jenkins wrote:
The kids who have grown up consuming and enjoying Pokémon across media are
going to expect this same kind of experience from The West Wing as they get
older. By design, Pokémon unfolds across games, television programs, films, and
books, with no media privileged over any other. For our generation, the hour-long,
ensemble-based, serialized drama was the pinnacle of sophisticated storytelling,
but for the next generation, it is going to seem, well, like less than child's play.
Younger consumers have become information hunters and gatherers, taking
pleasure in tracking down character backgrounds and plot points and making
connections between different texts within the same franchise.
20

Jenkins called the result of this combination transmedia storytelling, or the telling of a story
using multiple media types.
21
In transmedia storytelling, the first chapter of a narrative
might be told as a TV show, the second chapter might be told as a film, and the third might
be told as a video game – much like Pokémon in the example above. Jenkins clarified his
definition of the term in his 2006 book Convergence Culture:

19
A version of this introductory chapter originally appeared in my 2007 MIT Master’s Thesis,
“Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics, and Production at the Jim Henson Company.”
20
Jenkins 2003.
21
Note that Jenkins did not coin the term – that honor goes to Marsha Kinder, although she meant it a bit
differently. More on that in a bit.
Long 50

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text
making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.
22

…And further refined that definition in a 2007 post to his weblog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan:
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. Ideally, each
medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for
example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through
three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book
stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where
one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix
universe.
23

Jenkins’ suggestion that the franchise surrounding the 1999 science fiction blockbuster The
Matrix was (at that time) the most ambitious example of this new type of storytelling was right
on the money. Creating merchandise to further capitalize upon a successful piece of
entertainment is nothing new – as Andrew Lang pointed out in his Critical Comments on the
1911 edition of The Works of Charles Dickens, the popularity of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers
spawned “Pickwick chintzes, Weller corduroys, Pickwick cigars, Pickwick hats, Pickwick canes
(with tassels), Pickwicj coats (of peculiar cut and color) [and] Boz cabs rattled through the
streets”
24
– and the creation of spinoff content is a similarly long-familiar practice, but the
Wachowski siblings did something much more shrewd.
When The Matrix became a hit, the Wachowskis looked at the types of materials that commonly
sprang up around a successful genre franchise and then sketched out a plan to use each of these
additional media components to strategically and deliberately extend their primary story. By

22
Jenkins 2006, pp. 95-96.
23
Jenkins 2007.
24
Lang 1911, p. xiii.
Long 51
incorporating all of this 'secondary' media material into their mental map from the outset, each of
the additional media components in the Matrix franchise (including comics, a series of short
anime films, a video game, and a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game), offered
increased value as a contribution to a single massive story, thus becoming more deeply engaging
to audiences as a whole and simultaneously providing multiple points of entry to the narrative
franchise. Moviegoers could experience one of the three films first; a gamer could get hooked by
picking up Enter the Matrix; an anime fan could enter the franchise through The Animatrix, and
so on. Leveraging a successful IP across multiple media is a common tactic in our conglomerate-
heavy entertainment industry, but in true, deliberate and strategic transmedia storytelling the
motivation for an audience member to collect all of these media components is increased by
promising not narrative repetition, but extension. Each component could be experienced
separately and still be enjoyable, but taken together they become a single unified storytelling
experience that is, ideally, greater than the sum of its parts. As Jenkins notes:
The Wachowski brothers played the transmedia game very well, putting out the
original film first to stimulate interest, offering up a few Web comics to sustain
the hard-core fan's hunger for more information, launching the anime in
anticipation of the second film, releasing the computer game alongside it to surf
the publicity, bringing the whole cycle to a conclusion with The Matrix
Revolutions, and then turning the whole mythology over to the players of the
massively multiplayer online game. Each step along the way built on what has
come before, while offering new points of entry.
25

In this way, transmedia storytelling can be seen as an expertly and explicitly designed version of
what literary critic Julia Kristeva calls ‘intertextuality’. According to Kristeva, every text exists
not in isolation but in a complex web of interconnectedness with other texts that influenced it or
are influenced by it, texts that it references or that reference it, and so on. Transmedia
storytelling is a kind of radical intertextuality, both complicating and formalizing this concept
through strategic intermedial deployment – in other words, deliberately designing the total
experience both at the huge meta-story macro-level and at the fine detail micro-level within each
component. Transmedia stories like The Matrix build narrative references into each component

25
Jenkins 2006, p. 95.
Long 52
(the TV show ‘chapter’, the film ‘chapter’, the video game ‘chapter’, etc.) to direct audiences not
just from start to finish in each component but through the larger macro-story experience of the
franchise. Although each component can be experienced individually, they all clearly exist in
relation to each other in the larger transmedia story, and reinforce the experience of each other so
that the total ideal experience is only had when all of the franchise is consumed in toto.
Were The Matrix a more ‘traditional’, non-transmedia franchise, the films would most likely
have been created independently of all the secondary cruft, and any additional media components
would be treated by the moviegoing public as so much optional cash-grabbing fluff. Instead, the
video game Enter The Matrix tells what happens to the Osiris, the craft piloted by Jada Pinkett
Smith's character in the second film. "The Kid's Story," another short in The Animatrix,
introduced the character The Kid and provides an explanation for why he greets Neo (and the
audience) in The Matrix Reloaded in an overly, even uncomfortably, familiar fashion. Perhaps
most importantly, the two-part animated short film "The Second Renaissance" in The Animatrix
explains the troubled rise of the robot civilization. By giving the robots a much more nuanced
origin, “The Second Renaissance” makes them astonishingly sympathetic, and, in so doing,
makes the final act of the trilogy much more emotionally resonant and significantly more
satisfying.
By explicitly setting each of these extensions in canon, audiences gain some sense as to where
each component falls in relation to the others. Even if the extensions of one media type do not
incorporate any explicit references to events that occur in extensions of other media types, the
shared timeline does provide implicit connections between them, as might be generally graphed
as follows:

TIME
Game Game Game
Film Film Film
Comic Comic Comic
Film
Long 53

As both Jenkins and transmedia scholar Marc Ruppel note, one such connection is a letter that
the Wachowskis guided across multiple components of the franchise. This letter, which tells of
an upcoming attack by the machines on the human city of Zion, makes its debut in The Animatrix
short "The Final Flight of the Osiris", in which "the protagonist, Jue, gives her life trying to get
[the] message into the hands of the Nebuchadnezzar crew".
26
This letter then serves as the
Hitchcockian MacGuffin in the video game Enter The Matrix, which begins with a mission to
fetch the letter from a guarded post office inside the Matrix. The Matrix Reloaded begins with
the characters having received the letter and discussing "the last transmissions of the Osiris".
Ruppel refers to these intermedial hooks as 'migratory cues', "the means through which various
narrative paths are marked by an author and located by a user through activation patterns”.
27

If we consider the course of the letter to be a narrative thread of its own, its story is a prime
example of what transmedia storyteller and scholar Christy Dena calls transfiction, perhaps the
truest form of transmedia storytelling: its opening chapter is told in anime, its second chapter is
told in a game, and its third chapter is experienced in a feature film. Each of these components
makes a distinct and valuable contribution to the narrative whole, demonstrating the power of
carefully orchestrated transmedia storytelling. Further, by establishing these migratory cues
between the different extensions, the bonds between each of the extensions are strengthened and
the increased value in experiencing the franchise as a whole becomes more readily apparent to an
audience. The story of the letter in the Matrix franchise might be graphed as follows:

26
Jenkins 2006, p. 102.
27
Ruppel 2005.
TIME
Enter the Matrix
Video Game
Last Flight of the Osiris
(The Animatrix animation)
The Matrix
film
The Matrix
Reloaded
film
Long 54

In this diagram, we see how the tale of the letter in The Matrix unfolds in the very manner that
Jenkins describes in his definition. The story flows from the first Matrix film to the Last Flight of
the Osiris animation in The Animatrix on into the Enter the Matrix video game and then to the
second film, The Matrix Reloaded. Each of these components in the franchise makes a distinctive
and valuable contribution to the storyline of the letter, and thus tells a transmedia story.

A Brief Note on the Terminology Wars
Jenkins’ definition is not without its detractors. Other terms that have been proposed to describe
this phenomenon include cross-media, polymorphic media, and deep media, and that’s just the
tip of the iceberg.
Matt Hanson refers to the practice as ‘screen bleed’ in his 2003 book The End of Celluloid: Film
Futures in the Digital Age:
Originally a technical term (when non-broadcast safe colors, which are very
bright or color-saturated, bleed into other areas of the screen), screen bleed is a
useful term to appropriate to describe a modern narrative condition where fictive
worlds extend into multiple media and moving image formats. I believe the
condition of screen bleed is proliferating due to the immersive 3D worlds we
explore as game players and digital media consumers. This is why all-
encompassing mythologies are the most resonant with contemporary audiences.
After all, if a gaming experience is so involving, so cinematic, why shouldn’t we
expand the experience into film or interactive online worlds, where each strand of
narrative offers a new dimensional layer?
28

Mimi Ito, meanwhile, refers to the Pokémon/Yu-Gi-Oh model as an example of the Japanese
‘media mix’ approach:

28
Hanson 2003, p. 47.
Long 55
By linking content in multiple media forms such as video games, card games,
television, film, manga books, toys, and household objects, Pokémon created a
new kind of citational network that has come to be called a “media mix”… Rather
than spoon-feed stabilized narratives and heroes to a supposedly passive audience,
Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh invite children to collect, acquire, recombine, and enact
stories within their peer networks, trading cards, information, and monsters in
what Sefton-Green has called a “knowledge industry”. These media mixes
challenge our ideas of childhood agency and the passivity of media consumption,
highlighting the active, entrepreneurial, and technologized aspects of children’s
engagement with popular culture.
29

In his 2005 PhD thesis Learning to Speak Braille: Convergence, Divergence and Cross-Sited
Narratives, Marc Ruppel refers to transmedia stories as 'cross-sited narratives', declaring them to
be "a unique product of cultural and economic convergence, a process of narrative convergence".
Ruppel defines 'cross-sited narratives' as "multi-sensory stories told across two or more diverse
media (film, print literature, web, video games, live performance, recorded music, etc.)".
In his 2012 book The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood,
Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, Frank Rose calls this kind of Internet-enabled,
interconnected storytelling “deep media”:
Under [the Internet’s] influence, a new type of narrative is emerging – one that’s
told through many media at once in a way that’s nonlinear, that’s participatory
and often gamelike, and that’s designed above all to be immersive. This is “deep
media”: stories that are not just entertaining, but immersive, taking you deeper
than an hour-long TV drama or a two-hour movie or a 30-second spot will permit.
This new mode of storytelling is transforming not just entertainment (the stories
that are offered to us for enjoyment) but also advertising (the stories marketers tell
us about their products) and autobiography (the stories we tell about ourselves).
30

29
Ito 2006, p. 4.
30
Rose 2012, p 3.
Long 56
Christy Dena takes issue with some of the finer points of Jenkins' definition, preferring instead
the terms 'cross-media entertainment' and, as I mentioned, 'transfiction'. To Dena, 'cross-media
entertainment' functions as an umbrella term for Jenkins' idea of transmedia storytelling,
endeavors like ARGs (alternate reality games), and her notion of transfiction:
By transfiction I refer to stories that are distributed over more than one text, one
medium. Each text, each story on each device or each website is not autonomous,
unlike Henry Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling. In transfiction (a term to counter
Jenkins’, though they should be the other way around!), the story is dependent on
all the pieces on each medium, device or site to be read/experienced for it to be
understood. Basically, no single segment will be sufficient. These will vary
between being experienced simultaneously and sequentially. Examples we see
now are parallel narratives with TV shows that you can participate with by
answering a quiz on the Web, mobiles, etc (especially here in [Australia]). But,
we'll see stories, not just games being experienced this way. In consequence too,
we'll see more technologies for having ‘hyperlinks’ between media. Using blue-
tooth [sic], wireless, infra-red or something.
31

What Dena describes is perhaps the most stringent definition of transmedia storytelling. Under
Jenkins' definition, each transmedia extension can stand on its own as an individually enjoyable
entity – so one could play Enter The Matrix or watch The Animatrix without seeing the original
Matrix films and still enjoy each of them independently. (See “Modularity” in part III of this
book.) Under Dena's 'transfiction' definition, however, the independent media components
couldn't stand on their own any more than an individual chapter of a novel taken out of context.
32

I would argue that Dena’s transfiction is actually a subset of Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling.
While not all transmedia storytelling might be considered transfiction due to the ability of each

31
Dena 2006.
32
It’s worth noting that what Jenkins observes is less a factor of aesthetics and more one of pure
practicality; as transmedia storytelling continues to develop and proves itself to be economically viable,
more and more instances may trend towards the more closely-linked interdependency described by
Dena’s ‘transfiction’.
Long 57
extension to stand on its own (a decision often made for pragmatic reasons more than aesthetic
ones), all transfiction would be instances of transmedia storytelling.
33

Still other academics use the term ‘transmedia’ interchangeably with ‘cross-media’, or even
‘multimedia’. Examples of this can be found in Marsha Kinder’s 1991 Playing with Power in
Movies, Television, and Video Games (the first known use of the term 'transmedia', but applied
more to multi-media franchise properties which encompassed narratively disconnected books,
comics and TV shows, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), in Sara Gwenllian-Jones’ 2004
essay “Virtual Reality and Cult Television” in Gwenllian-Jones’ and Roberta Pearson’s Cult
Television, throughout Marie-Laure Ryan’s 2004 Narrative Across Media: The Language of
Storytelling, and in Drew Davidson’s 2010 Cross-Media Communications: an Introduction to the
Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences.
I choose to use ‘transmedia’ because, to my mind, Jenkins’ terminology is the most appropriate
due to the common uses of ‘trans’ as a prefix; when discussing a form where audiences are
expected to follow a narrative across media forms, a sense of transportation is evoked, along the
same linguistic lines as transatlantic or transcontinental.
34

One particularly contentious battle in the terminology wars is whether or not transmedia
storytelling must be interactive. While there is a certain amount of meta-interactivity inherent in
requiring the audience to seek out each component of the story (thus the ‘game design’ aspect of
this book), I maintain that this is not true narrative interactivity – and, in fact, is an experience
design problem to be solved.
35
The East Coast-style stories that Andrea Phillips focuses on in her
A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling do rely heavily on audience interaction, especially
alternate reality games like ilovebees, but there are plenty of transmedia stories that do not
include interactivity, and are none the worse for wear. While The Matrix demonstrated how
interactivity can be a valuable addition to a transmedia story experience, Buffy the Vampire

33
See the chapter on Modularity in Part II for more on this.
34
Of course, we do say ‘cross-country trip’ instead of ‘trans-country trip’, so a certain degree of this may
always be in flux.
35
See “transmedia resistance” later in this section.
Long 58
Slayer’s transmedia jump from film to TV to comics didn’t require an interactive component to
be successful.
36

Another fierce debate rages over whether transmedia storytelling must be participatory. In Max
Giovagnoli’s 2011 Transmedia Storytelling: Imagery, Shapes and Techniques, he claims that
“doing transmedia means to agree to give a part of the authorship and responsibility of a tale to
the audience and other storytellers in order to create a participatory and synergistic story in the
experiences of the different audiences of the tale”. Again, I disagree – much like interactivity,
audience participation can add greatly to a transmedia story (in fact, I include “collaborative
authorship” among the transmedia aesthetics in part III of this book) but it isn’t mandatory for
something to be defined as a transmedia story.
I hold that a single author can tell the first half of a story in a book and the second half of the
story in a graphic novel, and that would qualify as a transmedia story, because it’s a story told
across multiple media. To my mind, interactivity or audience participation in a transmedia story
is akin to sprinkles on an ice cream sundae. An ice cream sundae doesn’t require sprinkles to
qualify as an ice cream sundae. Many people may feel that sprinkles would make an ice cream
sundae – any ice cream sundae – better, and in some folks’ opinion an ice cream sundae may feel
incomplete without sprinkles, but at the end of the day you can have a perfectly good ice cream
sundae sans sprinkles.
37

This murky, sometimes heated and sometimes silly terminology debate is indicative of how far
critical study of transmedia/cross-media/cross-sited/deep storytelling still has to go. Additional
terminology debates include what to call 'open world' versus 'closed world' narrative structures;
how exactly we define 'primary', 'secondary', and 'tertiary' components versus perhaps a
'complete franchise’; 'canonical' elements versus 'apocryphal' elements; ad infinitum and ad
nauseum.
I’m uninterested in wading too deeply into these debates here, because they strike me as
unwinnable, and – worse – frequently horrifically counterproductive. In the 13 years I’ve been

36
In fact, as of this writing, none of the seven Buffy video game projects to date are considered canonical,
and are more old-school licensed merchandise than true transmedia extensions.
37
And with that, I conclude what may likely be the silliest analogy I will make in this book.
Long 59
studying the transmedia storytelling, and without fail every year there is yet another flare-up over
terminology, or another event billed as an attempt to definitively settle the terminology battle
once and for all. To be blunt, it ain’t ever gonna happen. For a dose of perspective, try to define a
book.
Go on, I’ll wait.
OK, what have you got? Does it tell a story? Phone books don’t. Is it made of paper? E-books
aren’t. The very idea of what makes up a ‘book’ is under constant assault, and that’s a wonderful
thing – we wouldn’t have magnificent experiences like Moonbot Studios’ animated e-book of
William Joyce’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore or Cornelia Funke and Mirada
Studios’ Mirrorworld if people weren’t constantly questioning what can and cannot be done in a
book! Again returning to Phillips: “Don’t worry about whether or not your project is technically
going to be transmedia. Worry about making it something people will care about.”
38

There are many such questions that have yet to be sufficiently addressed, but perhaps the most
obvious is, simply, why is transmedia storytelling anything new?

New Stories for a New Audience
According to Dena, cross-media production was born from technological advances, specifically
the widespread availability of the Internet and computers advanced enough to enable users to
easily copy, paste, move, alter, and remediate content across a growing number of devices.
“Such transmedia forms emerged when the awareness and penetration of a large range of
technologies and artforms reached a pivotal point,” Dena writes. “That moment was, quite
poetically, the penultimate year of the 20th century: 1999.”
39

Dena lists multiple examples of early transmediation from that year, beginning with the work of
telematic artists Paul Serman and Andrea Zapp and the first Nokia Game, which followed the

38
Phillips 2012, p. 17.
39
Dena 2007.
Long 60
adventures of the fictional snowboarder Sisu across mobile phones, magazines and TV
advertisements. She agrees with Jenkins' consideration of The Matrix as "the first major
implementation of the transmedia approach", but also highlights two other narrative examples,
Homicide: Life on the Street and The Blair Witch Project:
[U.S.] viewers of the NBC television show Homicide: Life on the Street were
treated to a special “crossover episode”. It was not a crossover of worlds or
brands, instead, it was an intraworld, cross-platform traversal. On the 3rd and 4th
of February, detectives started investigating a webcast killing. These detectives
were not those seen on air though, they were the second shift detectives who
existed only on the Net. The Second Shift detectives deemed the case closed, but
then the detectives on the television show reopened the case in their television
episode called “Homicide.com,” which was broadcast on Feb 5th. The Net
detectives then concluded the case the following week on the 12th and 19th online.
In the same year there was another website that would drive audiences to another
medium: the cinema. The Blair Witch Project instory website chronicles the story
of three film students who have gone missing after trudging through a forest
investigating stories of a witch. To further solidify the fiction in reality, a
mockumentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, was aired on the Sci-Fi Channel just
before the release of the film The Blair Witch Project: a horror film produced by
Haxan Films, also delivered as a documentary.
40

Dena concludes:
Since this pivotal year, transmedia forms have flourished. We’ve seen enhanced
television, locative arts, pervasive gaming, alternate reality games, interactive
dramas and more being produced by corporations and individuals, experienced in
small local groups and by millions internationally. As I mentioned earlier, the Net
was a strong facilitating force in this emergence. Indeed, irrespective of the
platform, audiences are often referred to the Net with a URL in the credits of a
film or show, SMS or on a cereal box. Sometimes a URL is enough to motivate a

40
Ibid.
Long 61
cross-platform traversal and sometimes not; and of course not all referrals are
directed towards the Net.
41

In Learning to Speak Braille, Ruppel seems to agree, declaring that transmedia storytelling (or,
in Ruppel's terminology, 'cross-sited narratives') is "a unique product of cultural and economic
convergence, a process of narrative convergence". Ruppel quotes Niklas Luhmann as follows:
The higher complexity of a new level of development makes it possible to
reinvest the old (in this case, print) with a new meaning, as far as it lets itself be
integrated. New technological achievements do not necessarily mean the forceful
negation of older media, but rather their recombination.
42

It's possible to view the rise of transmedia storytelling as a descendent of the 'multimedia' that
had everyone buzzing in the 1990s. As processor power increased and the cost of storage space
and media creation plummeted, computers became an increasingly viable delivery mechanism
for multiple media forms: first text, then images and music, and most recently video. The
addition of interactivity and the collective intelligences enabled by instant access to communities
of like-minded individuals via the Internet results in the perfect environment for just such
'recombination' to occur, which can then give rise to increasing complexity in narratives – both
in aesthetics and in media forms. As Jenkins observes in Convergence Culture:
Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any
fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing
down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via
online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests
time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience.
43

In his blog post titled “Transmedia Storytelling 101", Jenkins continues this observation
concerning collective intelligence:

41
Ibid.
42
Ruppel 2005.
43
Jenkins 2006, p. 21.
Long 62
Transmedia storytelling is the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective
intelligence. Pierre Lévy coined the term, collective intelligence, to refer to new
social structures that enable the production and circulation of knowledge within a
networked society. Participants pool information and tap each other’s expertise as
they work together to solve problems. Lévy argues that art in an age of collective
intelligence functions as a cultural attractor, drawing together like-minded
individuals to form new knowledge communities... Transmedia storytelling
expands what can be known about a particular fictional world while dispersing
that information, insuring that no one consumer knows everything [and] that they
must talk about the series with others (see, for example, the hundreds of different
species featured in Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh). Consumers become hunters and
gatherers moving back across the various narratives trying to stitch together a
coherent picture from the dispersed information.
44

The Internet may have accelerated transmedia development, but it wasn't necessary for vast
narratives to flourish, as evidenced by the "Netless" development of such vast narrative
franchises like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and, as Matthew Freeman describes in
his 2016 book Historicizing Transmedia Storytelling, the worlds of The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan
and Superman. Notions of narrative complexity have been plaguing authors, audiences, and
literary critics alike for centuries. As Ruppel observes, transmedia stories "[resemble] the ideal
text so long theorized by Barthes and others as requiring a corresponding ideal reader to
comprehend its whole."
45

Returning to literary theory, French literary theorist Gérard Genette’s notions of hypertexts and
hypotexts are particularly relevant to transmedia storytelling, insofar as they are refinements of
Kristeva’s aforementioned model of intertextuality. In his 1982 text Palimpsests: Literature in
the Second Degree, Genette examines how ‘second-degree’ hypertexts are intertextually
connected through influence, allusion, or more direct methods to earlier hypotexts. An example
of this would be the hypertextual connection between James Joyce’s Ulysses and its hypotext,
the original Homeric poems.

44
Jenkins 2007.
45
Ruppel 2005.
Long 63
Under Genette’s theoretical model, it’s possible to classify the primary (or ‘tentpole’) media
components of a transmedia franchise (e.g., the ten-and-counting Star Wars films) as hypotexts
and the secondary media components (the books, comics, TV shows and so on) as hypertexts.
Similarly, what serve as hypotexts within these franchises are also hypertextually linked to
earlier influences external to the franchises, such as how Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress,
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the Flash Gordon film serials all
served as well-known hypotextual inspirations for George Lucas as he was creating Star Wars.
Transmediation is a more distinct subclass of such hypertextuality; since Peter Jackson’s Lord of
the Rings films are hypertextually connected to the hypotext of Tolkien’s books, the distinction
must be made that while all transmedia stories have intertextual connections, not all
intertextually (or hypertextually) connected stories are transmedia storytelling.
All hyper/hypo-bole aside, the point remains: these types of relations and connections were being
made (and heatedly debated) long before the Internet was invented.
A second counterargument against a purely technocentric causality can be boiled down to
something far simpler and much less intellectually pure: money. While the Internet certainly
makes the creation of these Barthesian 'ideal readers' much, much easier, as Jenkins observes in
the quote at the beginning of this chapter, transmedia storytelling’s increased popularity is also
due to franchise-hungry corporations. A well-orchestrated transmedia story will sell not just a
single $10 movie ticket to a given audience member, it can also sell multiple $10 books, a $20
boxed set for each season of a TV show, multiple $60 video games, et cetera. A 2005 Forbes
article, “Star Wars’ Galactic Dollars”, estimates the (circa 2005) Star Wars financial breakdown
as follows: $6.52B in global box office sales, $700M in books and other publishing, $2.8B in
home video sales, $1.5B in video games, and a whopping $9B in toys. This places the estimated
value of the Star Wars transmedia brand then at $20.52B, or $20,520,000,000, for those of us
who like to see all the zeroes.
46
This makes Disney’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm for $4B look
like an absolute steal.
This drive for transmedia franchises is further accelerated by the corporate deregulation that
began during the Reagan administration. As Southern Illinois University’s Dr. Eileen Meehan

46
Hesseldahl 2005.
Long 64
describes in “’Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!’: The Political Economy of a Commercial
Intertext”, megacorporations such as Viacom, Time Warner, and Disney have, through various
mergers and acquisitions, developed divisions for the creation of comics, films, TV shows, toys,
clothing, video games – in short, all the components of a transmedia franchise.
47
By creating and
nurturing franchises that can utilize multiple divisions of these corporate giants, not only is more
business generated for the conglomerate as a whole, but the percentage of profits retained by the
parent corporation is greatly increased, instead of being diluted by outsourcing the creation of
any of these components to other potential competitors. As Jenkins notes on his blog, “Modern
media companies are horizontally integrated - that is, they hold interests across a range of what
were once distinct media industries. A media conglomerate has an incentive to spread its brand
or expand its franchises across as many different media platforms as possible. Consider, for
example, the comic books published in advance of the release of such films as Batman Begins
and Superman Returns by DC (owned by Warner Brothers, the studio that released these films).
These comics provided back-story which enhanced the viewer's experience of the film even as
they also help to publicize the forthcoming release (thus blurring the line between marketing and
entertainment).”
48

Of course, this only works if the transmedia story experience is sufficiently well-designed for
participants to continue to engage with the franchise beyond their first point of contact. This is
not as easy as it sounds because of transmedia resistance.

47
Meehan 1991.
48
Jenkins 2007.
Long 65
II. Designing Transmedia Storyworlds
Transmedia Resistance and the Four Stages of Transmedia
Experiences
‘Transmedia resistance’ is the inherent friction that’s involved with moving through the four
stages of a transmedia experience. Think of transmedia resistance like electrical resistance: the
amount of resistance in an electrical system diminishes how efficiently an electrical current will
flow through said system. Designing transmedia experiences is, at least in part, the art of
minimizing transmedia resistance as much as possible, so that participants in transmedia
experiences will flow throughout the system as freely as possible, consuming as much content
within the system as possible, and thus generating as much value as possible for both the
participant and the storyteller.
To reduce transmedia resistance, it helps to understand the four main stages of a transmedia
experience where such resistance may be found: Discover, Collect, Consume and React. Each of
these four stages has a certain degree of transmedia resistance inherent to it.

Discover
The transmedia resistance in the “Discover” stage is pretty straightforward – even if someone
experienced the ‘tentpole’ component of a transmedia franchise, it’s often surprisingly difficult
for them to discover that the rest of the franchise even exists.
Think back to when you went to the movie theater to see a blockbuster film – say, JJ Abrams’
2009 reboot of Star Trek.
49
What pointers, if any, do you remember to IDW’s graphic novel Star
Trek: Countdown, which bridged the original Star Trek universe and Abrams’ reboot? I’d wager
that you didn’t see anything at the theater that tipped you off to its existence – and, unless you
were a hardcore Star Trek fan (or a comics fan), that you probably didn’t know about that

49
Hey, I’m still a fairly new parent. My wife and I don’t get to go to the movie theater that often anymore.
Long 66
prologue comic at all, even though the comic was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci,
the screenwriters for the film, and it made certain parts of the film (particularly the relationship
between Spock Prime and Nero) make significantly more sense.
50

This gets to the heart of Jenkins’ likening of transmedia story participants to hunters and
gatherers, but hunting and gathering is work. There is a huge amount of transmedia resistance
inherent to the fact that nine times out of ten (if not more), there is no obvious cross-promotion
going on between components of a transmedia franchise at the point of initial consumption. If
you’re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix, as of this writing there is no specific
notification, when you hit the end of the TV show episodes after Season 7, that showrunner Joss
Whedon produced an official, canonical Season 8 in comic books from Dark Horse. Simply
discovering that the rest of the transmedia franchise even exists is often quite difficult.

Collect
Continuing with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer example, my mother happens to be a huge Buffy
fan.
51
Ignoring for a moment that it’s highly improbable that Mom would ever have Discovered
the Buffy comic if I, her comics-loving son, hadn’t dutifully told her – how, precisely, was she
going to get those Buffy comics? For years, purchasing a comic book extension to a TV show had
two significant elements of inherent transmedia resistance: one, finding a comic shop (which is
frequently far from easy, particularly in places like my aforementioned hometown in rural Ohio)
and two, dealing with the subculture of comics shops and comic shop people. My mother is a
very brave woman, but even I shudder at the thought of my mom having to deal with Comic
Book Guy from The Simpsons.
Even if she did, however, the act of collecting isn’t always easy or straightforward. Very few
transmedia franchises provide collectors with a map for all of its extensions, indicating to
audiences how many extensions exist, how they narratively fit together, and which ones each
participant has already collected or has yet to acquire. The serialized, numbered nature of comics

50
For more about this, see the “Additive Comprehension” chapter in Part II.
51
I’m not sure if it’s a point of personal geek shame or pride that Mom was into Buffy long before I was.
Long 67
help, but as any comics fan will tell you, it’s not always easy to track down all the issues of a
particular story, and – in the case of crossovers or spin-offs – it’s not always easy to discern how
many related pieces of content there are or how they’re meant to fit together. Again, in the case
of Buffy, Mom might be able to find a comic shop and then find the Buffy comics, but she might
not know that as of this writing there has also been a plethora of spin-off comics attached to the
Dark Horse Buffy books, including an Angel and Faith spin-off, a Spike spin-off, a Willow spin-
off… And that’s to say nothing of the also-canonical Angel comics from rival publisher IDW,
which later made the jump to Dark Horse under the different title Angel and Faith… Much as
with Discovery, Collecting often requires a great deal of work.

Consume
Transmedia storytelling is often written off as a geek’s hobby in part because frequently only
geeks have all the skills required to even consume all the media included in the entire franchise.
For example, those unfamiliar with the “visual language” of comics that Scott McCloud
describes in Understanding Comics may find it difficult to follow Buffy the Vampire Slayer from
the TV show to the comic books. Those who aren’t gamers (and thus haven’t developed the
staggering array of muscle memories and behaviors required to skillfully navigate the 20-odd
points of input on a standard game console controller) will have a difficult time following James
Cameron’s Avatar from the movie to any of the numerous Avatar video games.
52

We cannot forget that media, very crudely defined, are materials through which transmissions
are communicated – and all transmissions require both a transmitter and a receiver.
53
If the

52
Never mind that most of the Avatar video games weren’t very good – but that’s a topic for another
book.
53
I do mean ‘crudely’ – definitions of ‘media’ and models of how media work are the backbone of the
entire field of media studies. In his highly influential essay “Encoding, Decoding,” Stuart Hall posits a
different four-step model: production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction. Hall gives
much greater consideration to the social and semiotic ramifications of who and how is doing the
transmitting and receiving of messages than I’m exploring here – but Hall’s model is particularly
compelling when considering transmedia storyworlds as, as Benjamin Durhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa
advocate, transtexts that incorporate ‘unauthorized’ content such as fan fiction as well.
Long 68
recipient of the message isn’t sufficiently fluent in the medium through which said transmission
is being communicated, then it will be difficult for them to receive the transmission properly. In
other words, they will experience a significant amount of transmedia resistance when trying to
consume a given component.

React
According to the (rather romantic) belief that storytelling began with early humans gathered
around a fire, ancient oral storytelling involved a live storyteller watching her live audience and
most likely editing her performance as she went based on their reactions. Such reactions may be
as overt as deliberate attempts by the audience to impact the way the story unfolded, or as subtle
as simple emotional reactions flitting across their faces that cued the storyteller to speed up or
slow down. Either way, as a story continues the audience has always reacted in some form or
another. What has changed is how easily (and quickly) the storyteller can monitor those reactions
and respond. In contemporary transmedia storytelling, the systems that enable such response are
wide and varied – and almost all with some degree of resistance.
At the most basic level, a participant will decide whether or not they wish to continue
experiencing the story. If they choose to do so, then the four stages start over again as the
participant must Discover which part of the franchise to experience next, as described above and
with all the resistance inherent therein.
The next notch up on the dial is conversation. Audiences love to discuss what they’ve
experienced with one another, whether it’s with the person beside them on the couch, at the
water cooler at work the next day, on Twitter or Facebook, or on dedicated online forums about
the franchise. The degrees of resistance in each of these vary, of course, with the primary points
of resistance being how to find others to talk to (that is, the community) and the classic issue of
signal-to-noise.
54

54
See the comedic Twitter account @AvoidComments for this issue in a nutshell.
Long 69
At a much higher degree of interactivity is the classic concept of allowing the audience to
directly impact the course of the story. This is an area of great resistance, of course, because of
how difficult this is to do at scale,
55
but it is also the area of greatest interest as entertainment
continues to evolve.

So how do we create more resistance-free transmedia experiences? Just as in other systems, this
is done by either reducing friction or increasing energy. In transmedia stories, this means making
the experience easier or making audiences more excited. More excited, or engaged, audiences
will be more likely to invest more energy (and money) in following a story across multiple media,
and if the experience of doing so is made significantly more frictionless, then so much the better!
So how might we make experiencing transmedia stories easier, and how might we make
audiences more excited to do so? That’s where transmedia aesthetics come in, and the notion of
how transmedia storyworlds should be designed as a kind of game between storyteller and
audience.

Transmedia Storytelling as Game Design
As Peter Hutchinson writes in Games Authors Play, the terms ‘game’ and ‘play’ are used more
or less interchangeably – but there is an important distinction between the two. “‘Play' operates
at a more superficial level, it is often ostentatious, it is incidental,” Hutchinson writes. “‘Game’,
on the other hand, suggests a more developed structure, it represents more of a challenge to the
reader, involves greater, more prolonged intellectual effort. It is not as 'obvious', as fleeting, as
the playful indulgence. It can suggest something which needs to be solved. It is more than the
mere decoration which play can be, more fundamental to the work in which it is employed, it
involves a goal.” It is this difference between wild play and the structure of rules or conventions
in games that Hutchinson says is the key – and that authors play literary games with their readers
through the conventions of storytelling. “A literary game may be seen as any playful, self-
conscious and extended means by which an author stimulates his reader to deduce or to speculate,

55
For much more on this topic, see Andrea Philips’ book A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling.
Long 70
by which he encourages him to see a relationship between different parts of the text, or between
the text and something extraneous to it.”
56

Hutchinson continues:
Most literary games rest on the strength of human curiosity – the mind's avid
desire for knowledge of outcome, for resolution of problems, in short, for 'truth'.
A concern for pattern and harmony seems firmly related to this fundamental urge.
Further, just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the reader abhor what might
be termed a thematic or sense 'void', or in fact any degree of thematic uncertainty.
As a result, the writer can rely on the reader's being prepared to speed up the
process of resolution ahead of the narrator, on his guessing and speculating on
events, causes, details and missing links.”
57

Storytelling is a constant game between the storyteller and her audience, in which the storyteller
is constantly setting up the most basic pas-de-deux of mysteries for the audience to solve:
STORYTELLER: This happened!
AUDIENCE: Ooh! Then what happened?
STORYTELLER: Then THIS happened!
AUDIENCE: OOH! THEN what happened?
And so on. However, this is too simplistic, and too authoritarian, a description. In reality, it’s
more like:
STORYTELLER: This happened!
AUDIENCE: Ooh! So then this could happen, or THIS could happen, or THIS
could happen, or even THIS could happen! So which was it?
STORYTELLER: Then THIS happened!

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Hutchinson 1983, pp. 14-15.
57
Hutchinson 1983, p. 21.
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AUDIENCE: Oh! OK, then that means that THIS could happen, or THIS could
happen, or…
This demonstrates that even traditional storytelling is inherently participatory. Audiences are
always anticipating what the storyteller is going to tell them next, with their imaginations leaping
to possibilities before the storyteller can answer the question.
Of course, as in any game, those possibilities are constrained by the rules of the game. Some
players will happily go along with the rules of the game, so the storyteller needs to have a good
understanding of what those rules are up front, and (subtly) make them clear in the story itself.
Other players will just as joyfully shatter those rules into tiny little pieces, but even then the old
adage holds true: you have to know the rules before you can break them. So even for gleeful
rule-breakers (like slash-fiction authors!) the storyteller must still have a good understanding of
the rules of their world. They must have a handle on what happened in their world, what is
happening in their world, and most importantly, what could happen in their world.
This is why transmedia storyworlds benefit greatly at the outset by creating a plan that makes
those rules clear. This is also known as a Narrative Design Document.
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Story Bibles, Game Design Documents and Narrative Design
Documents
A Narrative Design Document, or NDD, is a strange beast. Because it’s designed to serve as a
plan for how a storyworld will unfold across, and be developed for, multiple media it also takes a
lot of cues from across multiple media.

Television Story Bibles
Teams of traditional TV screenwriters usually create a big document for their show called a story
bible, which frequently contain:
• Overview/Introduction/Premise
• Characters
• Sample Episode Premises/Arcs
• Settings
These often include other important rules for those storyworlds, such as how technology works,
what kinds of weapons exist, and so on. A little bit of searching online will find numerous story
bibles that have been shared for various TV shows, which demonstrate the wide range of
approaches various showrunners have taken in authoring their bibles over the years. A few
examples are as follows.

Case Study: Batman: The Animated Series
As a cartoon, the Batman: The Animated Series writer’s bible, developed by Bruce W. Timm,
Paul Dini and Mitch Brian, is chock-full of illustrations.

Introduction General Series Concepts
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What Has Changed
Writing Style and Structure
Three Act Structures
Act Break Cliffhangers
Humor Guidelines
Batman
Bruce Wayne
Supporting Characters
Robin
Alfred
Commissioner James Gordon
Officer Renee Montoya
Detective Harry Bullock
Mayor Hamilton Hill
Summer Gleeson
Settings
Gotham City
The Bat Cave
The Villains
The Joker
The Penguin
The Catwoman
The Riddler
Two-Face
The Scarecrow
Poison Ivy
Ra’s al Ghul
Mr. Freeze
Other Characters
Episode Premises

Case Study: Battlestar Galactica
As a science fiction epic, Ronald D. Moore had to pay special attention to how this world
differed from our own, especially the history and rules of the villainous robot Cylons and the
rules of the Battlestar Galactica ship itself.
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Mission Statement
The Twelve Colonies
History
Religion
Culture and Society
Technology
The Cylons
Culture and Society
Technology
Character Biographies
Commander William Adama
President Laura Roslin
Captain Lee Adama
Lieutenant Kara Thrace
Colonel Saul High
Doctor Gaius Baltar
Chief Garen Tyrol
Lieutenant Sharon Valerii
Number Six
Storylines
Tension
Structure
The Cylons
Plot-driven Stories
Character Stories
Season One
Story Arcs
Character Arcs
The Battlestar Galactica
History
Combat Operations
Flight Operations
CIC
Maneuvering Galactica
Damage Control
Enlisted and Officers
Faster Than Light (FTL)
The Red Line

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Case Study: LOST
The Series Format document for LOST, written by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, opens with
an unusual “Q&A” that zeroes in on their vision for what the show is and is not. It is also,
perhaps predictably enough, full of lies and foreshadowing for what LOST would feel like. Even
in this early document – which was used to pitch the show to the execs – they stubbornly refused
to explain the polar bear. To their credit, they never would.

Introduction
I. A Brief Q&A
What Does an Episode Look Like?
Is LOST a Genre Show?
Is It Self-Contained or Serialized?
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What’s the Shape of the First
Season?
So What Is This Island, Exactly?
What About That “Monster”? How
the Hell Do You Sustain That Over a
Hundred Episodes?
So What About All the Other Crash
Survivors? Are They Just Hanging
Around All the Time?

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This is one of Abrams and Lindelof’s most
famous lies: “Self-contained. Seriously. We
promise.” HA!
TV Shows Need Home Sets – So…?
How Do You Service Thirteen Series
Regulars Every Week?
Are There Going to Be Guest Stars?
Seriously, Though, What’s Up with
That Polar Bear?
II. The Characters
Jack
Kate
Charlie
Sawyer
Boone
Shannon
Locke
Sayid
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Sun
Jin
Hurley
Claire
Michael
Walt
III. The Stories
Epilogue: The Hard Sell

Video Game Design Documents and Story Bibles
Game designers, by contrast, create big documents for their games called game design
documents, or GDDs. As Tracy Fullerton writes in Game Design Workshop, a GDD frequently
includes:
Design History
Vision Statement
Audience, Platform and Marketing
Legal Analysis
Gameplay
Game Characters
Story
The Game World
Media List
Technical Spec
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59
Fullerton 2014, pp. 448-452.
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A story bible for a video game is frequently a mashup of a GDD and a TV-style story bible, but
with some additional areas added.
Overview/Introduction/Premise
High-Level Concept
Target Audience
Theme
Setting Overview
Characters
Heroes
Villains
Allies
Settings
Weapons
Vehicles
Other Artifacts
Game Story, Level by Level

Case Study: Doom
In 1992, Tom Hall wrote a GDD for the classic first-person shooter game Doom called,
appropriately enough, the Doom Bible. As an early video game, this document had a
considerable amount of technical information in it – but it also had a good amount of the story
aspects of Doom as well. It contained:
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Game Specs Section
Doom Command Line Parameters
Intro and Demo Loop
Control Panel
Play Loop
End of Game
Game Info
Characters
Episode 1
Story
Actors
Unique Bits
Maps
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Commercial
Stuff: Weapons, Items, Etc.
DOOM Press Release
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Random Notes
DOOM Calendar
Appendices
Glossary
File Extensions
Utilities
Random Extremely Important Info Too Small to Rate Having its Own Section
Known and Unfixed Bugs

Case Study: Grand Theft Auto
K.R. Hamilton's original 1995 game design document for Grand Theft Auto, then called Race'n
Chase, contained the following:
1. Introduction
1.1. Scope
1.2. Type Conventions
2. References
3. Target System
3.1. DOS
3.2. Windows 95
3.3. Renderware
4. Development System
4.1. Software
5. Specification
5.1. Concept
5.2. Story
5.3. Game Structure
5.4. Players
5.5. Action
5.6. Objective
5.7. Graphics
5.8. Data Storage
6. Gameplay
6.1. World
6.2. Landscape
6.3. Ground Type
6.4. Object Types
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6.5. Police
6.6. Control
6.7. Physics
7. Front End
7.1. Intro
7.2. Menus
8. Development Tools
8.1. Editor
9. Team
10. Time

Case Study: Grim Fandango
To celebrate its 10
th
anniversary in 2008, veteran game designer Tim Schafer posted the original
Puzzle Design Document for his classic LucasArts game Grim Fandango. The outline for that
document, which was authored in 1996 by Schafer, Peter Tsacle, Eric Ingerson, Bret Mogilefsky,
and Peter Chan, is as follows. As a puzzle game, this GDD is very story-heavy, and filled with
mood art illustrations.

Year One: El Marrow
Characters
Puzzle Structure – Year One
Location Layout – Year One
Cut-Scene and Puzzle Descriptions – Year
One
Year Two: Rubacava
Characters
Puzzle Structure – Year Two
Location Layout – Year Two
Cut-Scene and Puzzle Descriptions – Year
Two
Year Three: The Coral Mines
Characters
Puzzle Structure – Year Three
Location Layout – Year Three
Cut-Scene and Puzzle Descriptions – Year
Three
Year Four: Nuevo Marrow
Characters
Puzzle Structure – Year Four
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Location Layout – Year Four Cut-Scene and Puzzle Descriptions – Year
Four

Narrative Design Documents for Transmedia Storyworlds
Predictably, a Narrative Design Document should include elements of all of these, and some
more besides. Because so much of the ‘game’ of a transmedia storyworld hinges upon discover,
collect, consume and react, then a Narrative Design Document needs to include information not
just on the storyworld’s content, but also its distribution and aggregation plans. Further, because
transmedia storyworlds tend to be fairly big bets (in both time and money), the Narrative Design
Document should also display a clear understanding of why this storyworld will be successful –
who its audience will be, why they will enjoy it, and how the overall experience will be
profitable. Perhaps more than any other kind of storyteller, a transmedia storyworld-builder must
be entrepreneurial.
Such a document may take many forms, but a robust Narrative Design Document may include:
Executive Summary. A one-page description of the project that quickly captures the world and
what makes it compelling. This one-pager typically includes a short tagline, the genre (often an
'X+Y' combination of two ore more genres), a longer logline, and a brief synopsis. It may also
include a single piece of key art that captures the intended visual aesthetic of the world.
I. Overview/Introduction/Premise. Once the reader’s interest is piqued by the executive
summary, this is where we introduce the basics of the storyworld and its franchise potential.
1.1. High-Level Concept and Franchise Positioning. The storyworld’s unique x + y and how it
compares to its closest competitors. This should demonstrate that the franchise is unique enough
to stand on its own, while still demonstrate to more conservative audiences that it is similar
enough to existing successful IPs to not be a complete long-shot, high-risk bet.
1.2. Themes. What are the resonant motifs that run through the world and its stories?
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1.3. Target Audience. Who is this for? Why will they like it? This is less about demographics
and more about psychographics – identifying potential audiences for this storyworld and
displaying an understanding of what they want, and a first introduction to how this storyworld
will give it to them. (This will be revisited in greater length in section 10.3.)
1.4. Storyworld Aesthetic. What is the unique look and feel of this storyworld? What will make
it recognizable at a glance?
II. Storyworld. This is a much deeper dive into the rules and details of the world, including
maps and a description of key events.
2.1. Rules. What is and is not possible in this world? What are the high-level rules that dictate
those possibilities?
2.2. Maps. What is the geographical makeup of this world? What are its key locations? Where
are they in relationship to each other?
2.3. Timeline. What are they key events that have occurred, or will occur, in the storyworld?
III. Main Story, Super-Story and Side-Stories. This section describes the stories that will
unfold in the storyworld, beginning with the primary story and any ancillary stories that will lead
up to, accompany, or immediately follow the release of that primary story.
3.1. Narrative Architecture. How do the pieces of your storyworld fit together? How does the
main storyline accommodate multiple prequels or sequels, as well as any side-stories or spinoffs?
3.2. Main Story. What is the primary, or tentpole, story at the heart of your storyworld?
3.3. Super-Story. What is the macro-scale story of your world that might unfold across multiple
sub-franchises? (For example, the story of the Sith versus the Jedi in Star Wars, the rise and
possible fall of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, etc.).
3.4. Side Stories. What kind of extra stories might exist alongside your main narrative? These
might include character backstories, side missions, and so on.
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3.5. Experience Pathways. What are some of the ways your audience might explore this
storyworld? What characters are they set up to follow? What places might support multiple
stories? What objects might pass from character to character?
IV. Heroes. Who are the protagonists of your storyworld?
V. Villains. Who are the antagonists of your storyworld?
VI. Allies. Who are the other characters in your storyworld?
VII. Organizations. What are the groups of people in your storyworld, what characterizes them,
and how do they relate to each other?
VIII. Places. What are they key locations in your storyworld? What do they feel like? Who
might be found there?
IX. Artifacts. What are the most important items in this storyworld?
9.1. Weapons. If relevant, what deals damage in this world? Which of them are specific to
particular characters or groups of characters?
9.2. Wearables. What do people wear in this world? What do they signify? If relevant, how do
they prevent damage?
9.3. Artifacts. What other items exist in this world? What is their importance, and to whom?
9.4. Vehicles. How do people get around in this world? What are their special characteristics?
X. Franchise Plan. Now that your readers have a better, more detailed understanding of what
the world is you’re trying to make and what kinds of stories will exist in it, what is your plan for
how that experience will be designed?
10.1. Media Mix. What medium or multiple media will this storyworld exist in? What
component will exist in what medium, and why was that medium chosen for that particular
component?
10.2. Distribution Timeline. In what order will the components of this experience be
distributed? How will that affect the development time required?
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10.3. Target Fan Profile Strategies. Revisiting the multiple audiences established in 1.3, what
aspects of this franchise will appeal to each audience? How do you intend to delight each of
those audiences, and keep them coming back?
10.4. Fan Participation Strategies. Some of the most passionate fans of a successful storyworld
are eager to add to its ongoing development through such creative channels as fan fiction, user-
generated content, and so on. How do you plan to invite your fanbase to participate?
Appendix: References. What particular books, movies, music and so on specifically influenced
your storyworld, that you would want others who would work on this storyworld to experience to
better understand it?

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Exercise: Creating the Narrative Design Document
Using your writing system of choice, create a new document with the following template:
Executive Summary
Tagline
Genre
Logline
Synopsis
I. Overview/Introduction/Premise
1.1. Contents
1.2. High-Level Concept and Franchise Positioning
1.3. Themes
1.4. Target Audience
1.5. Storyworld Aesthetic
II. Storyworld
2.1. Central What-If
2.2. Rules
2.3. Maps
2.4. Timeline
III. Main Story, Super-Story and Side-Stories
3.1. Narrative Architecture
3.2. Super-Story
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3.3. Main Story
3.4. Side-Stories
3.5. Experience Pathways
IV. Heroes
V. Villains
VI. Allies
VII. Organizations
VIII. Places
IX. Artifacts
9.1. Weapons
9.2. Wearables
9.3. Artifacts
9.4. Vehicles
X. Bestiary
XI. Franchise Plan
11.1. Media Mix
11.2. Distribution Timeline
11.3. Target Fan Profile Strategies
11.4. Fan Participation Strategies
11.5. Alternate Versions
11.6. Transmedia Mechanics
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Appendix: References
This outline is what we’ll be populating as a template in the exercises throughout the rest of this
book. Your needs may vary – for example, I added a ‘Bestiary’ section after ‘Artifacts’ for the
Spookshow project I’ll be referring to as an ongoing demonstration – but I recommend using the
above as a template for you to fill in as we go.
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III. 10 Transmedia Aesthetics
Creating deep, rich, and successful transmedia story franchises requires more than just being able
to create a good film, a good book, a good comic, and so on. Yes, a transmedia storyteller needs
to master the aesthetics of each of these media,
60
but they also need to master an additional set of
skills to create narrative experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts. These skills
have a surprising amount in common with interaction design.
First, the storyteller must be able to create a set of unique storyworld characteristics that
essentially scopes the transmedia franchise, which “sets the rules” for what can and can not
happen within their storyworld, distinguishes their storyworld from their closest competitors, and
starts to create a narrative play space for the imaginations of their participants. These
characteristics should ideally be present in each component of the franchise, so that each
component is clearly recognizable as a part of that franchise.
Second, the storyteller must be able to create a clear canon or clear tiers of canon that
simplifies to audiences what does and does not happen within the timeline of their storyworld.
(Note that this is different from saying what can and cannot happen, as described above.) Some
franchises, like Star Wars, deliberately create multiple tiers of canon, and others, like Superman,
create multiple versions of the storyworld. In these cases, the storyteller must set clear boundaries
between them, in order to minimize confusion.
Third, the storyteller must be able to craft an extensible narrative architecture that serves as a
high-level framework for the macro-story of their franchise. There are multiple types of narrative
architectures out there, but certain types better lend themselves to supporting multiple sub-
franchises than others. This characteristic of supporting growth is what I mean by extensibility,
and is at the core of successful transmedia story franchise development. In many ways, this
narrative architecture is similar to developing the information architecture for a web site, and
developing a rough site map.
Fourth, the storyteller must be able to connect the components of their storyworld together
through experience pathways, which frequently rely upon negative space and Ruppelian

60
See the “Leveraged Affordances” chapter later in this section of the book.
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migratory cues. These function much like hyperlinks in a website, providing narrative-driven
pathways for audiences to follow through the franchise. Such experience pathways should be
deliberately crafted, much like the letter in The Matrix, in order to deliver enjoyable and
fulfilling narrative experiences. As with painting, the skillful use of negative space can also rely
on the audience’s negative capability, or the ability for their imaginations to fill in the gaps. Such
empty space can also function as a clear invitation for audience participation and collaborative
authorship, but more on that momentarily.
Fifth, the storyteller must be able to create extensible characters, or characters that are
specifically designed to function well across a vast transmedia franchise, from “high-res”
components like films and video games all the way down to “no-res” components like audio
dramas. Such characters will themselves function as experience paths for audiences to follow
through the franchise, as they seek out what happens to their favorite characters.
Sixth, the storyteller must be able to create additional experience paths that connect their
franchises together through extensible locations and objects. Although these frequently receive
less attention in traditional storytelling development courses than characters, these take on
additional value in transmedia story franchises because of the addition of location-based
storytelling (like theme parks and video games) and tangible storytelling (like replicas of
narrative artifacts).
Seventh, the storyteller must be able to master the art of creating additive comprehension in their
audiences, so that when a participant follows the storyteller’s carefully crafted experience paths,
there is a sufficient amount of narrative payoff to justify the amount of work the participant put
into overcoming any transmedia resistance. This balancing of labor and reward has a great deal
in common with game design.
Eighth, the storyteller must be able to then take their grand story and develop a transmedia
deployment plan, ideally leveraging the affordances of each medium involved. This requires an
understanding of what each medium does well and what each medium does poorly, in order to
maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of each medium in best service of the total
transmedia experience.
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Ninth, the storyteller must be able to carefully design each component to be sufficiently modular.
One of the greatest strengths of transmedia storytelling is also among its greatest weaknesses:
utilizing multiple media can help draw in wider audiences as participants first engage with the
storyworld through the medium most comfortable to them, but this means that each component
in the franchise must also be sufficiently engaging on its own to function as an ambassador for
the rest of the franchise. In many ways, transmedia story franchises are only as good as their
weakest components, because if a would-be participant’s first point of contact with the franchise
is a mediocre or downright bad experience, then the storyteller has lost a potential consumer for
every other piece in the franchise.
Finally, the storyteller must be able to open themselves up to collaborative authorship – not just
with other creative partners in the development of franchise components, but also with their
audience. This is why I refer to members of the audience as participants, because the notion of
participation is a crucial element of creating what R.A. Salvatore calls a “universe worthy of
devotion”.
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This development of a deliberately crafted meta-experience, and the aesthetics thereof, is the
kind of “transmedia storytelling” that I explore in this book. The interconnectedness described
above is why transmedia storytelling is often said to be a narrative form native to those who
grew up with the Internet, and is why transmedia storytelling is such a compelling future for
entertainment, particularly as all media become digital and connected to the cloud. The best
transmedia storytellers see all media as tools in their toolkit or paints on their palette, and – I’d
argue – are also able to see where the gaps are, so they can either repurpose things that aren’t
traditionally considered ‘media’ into storytelling devices or can create new forms of media that
don’t exist yet.
62

61
Salvatore 2010.
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See the “Unconventional Media” section of the “Leveraged Affordances” chapter for more on this.
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1. Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement
Interaction design and product design both advocate a philosophy of user-centered design,
which creates user profiles and design fictions to identify a problem experienced by a user,
a solution, and how the user will use that solution. This approach requires the designer to
understand the user, what the user wants, and how the user’s life will be improved by the
product. This commonly leads to the insight that is more than one kind of user; many
products have multiple kinds of users that choose a product for multiple reasons.
The same goes for designing transmedia storyworlds. Star Wars has multiple audiences that
love Star Wars for multiple reasons. If a narrative designer understands that their audience
is heterogeneous, that some fans love Star Wars for the unique spaceships and lightsabers,
others love it for the characters and their relationships, others love it for the mythology,
others love it for the philosophy, and so on, then they can design components of the
franchise to have particular appeal to different parts of that fanbase, thus increasing the
amount of energy (time, money, etc.) that those audience segments are willing to invest in
discovering, collecting, and consuming those extensions. This leverages the engagement of
those audience segments to ensure long-term success.

There’s one obvious stumbling block that traditional storytellers might trip over when attempting
to embrace this “transmedia storyworld as game” concept: how do you ‘win’ a transmedia
storyworld?
Further, insofar as a transmedia storyworld is a game, it’s an asymmetric one. That is to say, the
different players have different ‘win conditions’. The storyteller ‘wins’ if their audiences keep
following along, and the audiences ‘win’ if the storyteller does a good enough job to sustain their
enjoyment. This means that the game of a transmedia storyworld is actually cooperative, not
competitive. There is no ‘winner’ or ‘loser’ in a transmedia storyworld. In fact, if one player fails
to ‘win,’ then the other one loses as well!
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To further complicate matters, not all ‘players’ in the audience are the same, because different
types of audiences want different things out of the experience. Understanding the broad range of
fans you’re trying to attract, what they want, which of these types of fans will be the most
valuable to your storyworld’s success, and how to engage them as deeply as possible is more
important long-term than simply trying to produce a “four-quadrant” property.

Multiple Audiences
When someone begins to develop a transmedia story project, two questions that tend to pop up
super early (especially from producers!) are “How long will this take to produce?” and “How
much will this cost to make?”
These are the wrong questions.
Imagine you’re setting out to produce a book. Asking “How long will this take to produce?” and
“How much will this cost to make?” immediately prompts more appropriate questions: “What
kind of book are we trying to make?”, “What is this book for or about?”, and “Who is this book
for?” That last one in particular is important, because it leads to an even more valuable question:
“What do those people really want?”
Adopting this user-centered design approach – imagining the end user(s) at the beginning of the
process – reveals that the answers to those right questions can vary wildly. Are you making a
pop-up book for kids? Are you making a phone book? Are you making an encyclopedia? A dime
novel? A blank book? All of those answers will eventually lead to good answers to those two
wrong initial questions – “How long will this take to produce?” and “How much will this cost to
make?”
This also leads to several additional insights. First, no successful storyworld appeals to only one
kind of audience, and second, that focusing on audience motivation profiles ahead of audience
demographics can radically reconfigure how one understands not only one’s audience, but one’s
business model as well. If you understand how different motivations inspire your fans to engage
in specific ways, then you can create strategies to optimize fan loyalty, excitement, and
capitalization across your franchise.
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Different kinds of fan motivations are useful for different strategies:
• more collector-centric motivations can maximize the amount of revenue
generated per fan
• more social-centric motivations can maximize the number of (perhaps shallow
and temporary) fan engagements
• more narrative-centric motivations can maximize the duration of engagement, so
long as the storyworld remains consistently interesting
For best results, a storyworld should craft a mix of these types of engagements, leveraging
multiple fan types and multiple types of engagement to best meet overall strategic goals.

Richard Bartle’s Player Types
The notion that there are multiple audience motivations for a single experience is nothing new. In
1996 the game designer and theorist Richard Bartle penned a deeply profound essay called
“Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs” (or Multi-User Dungeons, the
precursor to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games like World of Warcraft). In it,
Battle wrote:
The four things that people typically enjoyed personally about MUDs were:
Achievement within the game context. Players give themselves game-related
goals, and vigorously set out to achieve them. This usually means accumulating
and disposing of large quantities of high-value treasure, or cutting a swathe
through hordes of mobiles (i.e., monsters built into the virtual world).
Exploration of the game. Players try to find out as much as they can about the
virtual world. Although initially this means mapping its topology (i.e., exploring
the MUD's breadth), later it advances to experimentation with its physics (i.e.,
exploring the MUD's depth).
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Socializing with others. Players use the game's communicative facilities, and
apply the role-playing that these engender, as a context in which to converse (and
otherwise interact) with their fellow players.
Imposition upon others. Players use the tools provided by the game to cause
distress to (or, in rare circumstances, to help) other players. Where permitted, this
usually involves acquiring some weapon and applying it enthusiastically to the
persona of another player in the game world.
…Labeling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers,
socializers and killers. An easy way to remember these is to consider suits in a
conventional pack of cards: achievers are Diamonds (they're always seeking
treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socializers are
Hearts (they empathize with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with
them).
Naturally, these areas cross over, and players will often drift between all four,
depending on their mood or current playing style. However, my experience
having observed players in the light of this research suggests that many (if not
most) players do have a primary style, and will only switch to other styles as a
(deliberate or subconscious) means to advance their main interest.”
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Ivan Askwith adopted a similar approach in his 2007 MIT Master’s Thesis, “Television 2.0:
Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium”. In it, Askwith posited that fans of the then-
hit TV show LOST could be classified according to whichever one of five ‘logics of engagement’
was their most dominant:
• The Logic of Entertainment: “The most basic desire that compels viewers to
seek out and watch television entertainment is just that: the pleasure of being
entertained.”
• The Logic of Social Connection: “When understanding a viewer’s desire for
social connection as a logic of engagement, the most important of these are

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Bartle 1996.
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television’s capacities to provide viewers with a basis for conversation and
social interaction and to create a sense of ‘belonging.’”
• The Logic of Mastery: “Mastery describes a mode of engagement that
satisfies the viewer’s intellectual desire to master complexities, interpret
nuances, and solve the challenges that a television series presents.”
• The Logic of Immersion: “‘Immersion’ describes a mode of engagement that
satisfies the viewer’s imaginative or emotional desires to be ‘surrounded’ or
‘subsumed’ by a television program.”
• The Logic of Identification: “As a term, identification describes the range of
ways in which engagement with television content may both help viewers to
formulate and/or reaffirm their personal identities (self-identification) and
allow them to express and signal those self-perceived identities to others
(social identification).”
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In 2016 I assisted Erin Reilly, then the Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at
the University of Southern California, in extending Askwith’s model out into eleven more
detailed logics of engagement. Reilly’s revised logics, constructed as part of a research study for
Havas exploring the different motivations driving fans of the World Cup, included:
• Entertainment: enjoying the overall experience and atmosphere surrounding one’s
passion
• Social Connection: integrating oneself in a fandom in order to create or deepen
relationships with other fans
• Mastery: consistently learning and understanding detailed information and stories
about one’s passion
• Immersion: losing oneself in the parallel universe of one’s passion by shifting one’s
focus from real life
• Identification: strongly associating oneself with a passion and defining oneself as a
fan

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Askwith 2007.
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• Pride: reflecting one’s fandom in outward appearance and public behavior
• Advocacy: championing one’s passion and taking positions on issues of importance
to the fandom
• Play: participating (virtually or in real life) in activities related to one’s passion
• Creation: expressing interest in how the original subject was made, or making
original content/media related to one’s passion
• Exploration: seeking to discover new points of interest related to one’s passion or to
be in the know about what’s new and on the cutting edge related to the passion
• Collection: striving to own a complete set of some specific objects or other items
related to one’s passion
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To continue along this line of reasoning, some primary motivations common to prolonged
engagement with transmedia storyworlds include:
• Action. What does this storyworld allow me to do? What are the particular activities
or play patterns that this storyworld sets up that I can recreate or act out on my own?
Storyworlds with key actions or action sequences can have deep, lasting impacts on
how audiences want to physically behave. This can be ideal for franchises that
include action-centric extensions such as toys, video games or theme parks.
• Collection. How much stuff exists that's associated with this franchise? Do I have all
of it? Do I have the best of it? Do I have the best of it for me? Creating a franchise
with both large sets of items to collect (e.g., Star Wars action figures released in
multiple collections), at multiple price points (from Wal-Mart to high-end designer
artist pieces in galleries) and with different degrees of scarcity (common versus
limited editions or exclusives) can maximize the amount of revenue generated by
your franchise's merchandise, and provide fans with the meta-game of hunting it
down.
• Creativity. How was this storyworld made? What can I make myself inspired by this
storyworld? How can I contribute to this storyworld? Franchises that invite audiences
access behind the curtain inspire fans who are particularly interested in the craft

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Reilly 2016, pp. 43-49.
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behind building storyworlds. These fans may be keenly interested in becoming
professional storytellers themselves someday, and may be fans of the creators more
than the storyworlds themselves. They may also want to tell their own stories with
these characters (fanfic) and share those stories with others, or create their own art or
artifacts (may or may not be for profit).
• Philosophy. What does this storyworld inspire me to think? How does my fandom of
this storyworld reflect, confirm, or challenge what I believe about the world? The
most powerful storyworlds inspire people and their behavior as much as, if not more
than, religions. As storytellers we have the opportunity and the responsibility to
imbue our tales with meaning, using our stories to teach as well as entertain. Fans
looking for more than cheap thrills will react positively to more thoughtful messaging
or provocative experiences.
• Social. What do my friends have to say about this? How can this franchise spark
conversations between me and other people I care about? How can I use this franchise
to say something about myself to others? Designing your franchise to be highly
social can also make your franchise spreadable, extending the breadth of your
franchise's reach as your fans spread the word about your franchise to other potential
fans. This can maximize the revenue from ratings or ticket sales during brief windows
when the content itself is highly popular – but it may not always be sustainable.
• Story. What is the plot? Who are the characters? What is the storyworld? What
happened in the past? What happened in the future? Perhaps most obviously for our
purposes, making your franchise's story as broad and deep as possible can extend the
amount of time and money an audience member will invest in your franchise,
assuming every story component delivers a sufficiently high-quality experience and
deepens the story-driven fan's understanding of the storyworld.
Again, it’s crucial to understand that while most fans have a dominant motivation, virtually every
fan is a mix of multiple motivations. As Reilly writes in the same article, “Motivators act as
lenses through which we can examine fans’ behaviors and desires to engage with a specific type
of content, people, or brands. Very few, if any, fans exhibit only one of the motivators at any
given time in their engagement. Instead, fans are usually engaging through mixtures of these
motivators, and common mixtures are recognizable as recurring fan mind-sets.”
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Identifying common mixes of multiple motivations enables us to start to generate user profiles, a
powerful tool frequently used by designers. This is a specific kind of storytelling, frequently
powered by extensive real-world observation and data collection, that creates fictional profiles
for possible users of one’s product. Crafting stories about how these characters use the product in
different ways helps the product’s designers to better understand what disparate types of
customers actually want, and create a product that delights as many disparate consumer types as
much as possible.
For transmedia storyworlds, the above motivations may most frequently combine into fan
profiles like the following.
• The Mythologist. Deeply invested in the storyworld. Obsesses over the fine details,
especially timelines, obscure characters, locations and objects. The Mythologist’s
primary motivation is Story, followed by Collection, Social (argues over details with
others) and Philosophy (thinks deeply about the story and what it means).

• The Romantic. Deeply invested in the characters of the storyworld and the relationships
between them. Obsesses over "will they or won't they" relationships (e.g., The X-Files,
Moonlighting), and may engage in writing fan fiction that explores their favorite
"shipping" (from "relationship") character pairings. The Romantic’s primary motivations
are both Story and Social (although their interest is in the interpersonal dynamics in the
fiction more than in their own interactions with others), followed by Creativity.

• The Completionist. Driven to collect everything you put out there. Collects all the
games, all the books, all the movies, all the toys, for the sake of having a complete
collection. The Completionist’s primary motivation is Collection, followed by Story and
Social (many Completionists take great pride is showing off their collections).

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• The Connoisseur. May only buy a few select pieces of content or merchandise, but may
invest heavily in those few pieces. Attracted to the rare, the particularly artfully done, or
those pieces that speak to their own philosophy, their particular worldview or how they
want to be seen by others. The Connoisseur’s primary motivations are Collection,
Philosophy and Social, followed by Story.

• The Playgrounder. Loves the opportunities for play that the storyworld affords.
Purchases toys, costumes, games and other elements that allow them to engage in play,
plain and simple, by themselves or with others. The Playgrounder’s primary motivation is
Action, followed by Social and Story.

• The Socialite. Loves the opportunities to socialize with their friends that the storyworld
affords (e.g. viewing parties for a regular TV show, getting together with friends to attend
the opening night of a feature film). May be attracted to a particular storyworld to use it
to communicate something about themselves to others. The Socialite’s primary
motivation is Social, followed by Philosophy and Story.

• The Maker. Obsessed with the process of how the storyworld was made; may well be
fans of the creators more than the storyworlds themselves. They may also want to tell
their own stories with these characters (fanfic) and share those stories with others, or
create their own art or artifacts (may or may not be for profit). The Maker’s primary
motivation is Creativity, followed by Social.

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Keep in mind that these are far from the only fan profiles that exist. Different storyworlds
have a unique mix of characteristics that will attract different fans for different reasons. A list of
fan types for Star Wars, for example, might include fans that are specifically attracted to the
storyworld’s approach to speed, like the dogfights between X-Wings and TIE Fighters, the
speeder bikes in Return of the Jedi or the podraces in The Phantom Menace. Such a fan might be
labeled as The Speed Demon, The Thrill-Seeker, or something similar. The trick is to think
carefully about what mix of disparate and/or complementary motivations will make up your
target audience(s), and use that to inform your creative decisions when shaping your storyworld.
So, once you have an idea as to who your storyworld is primarily for, what should you do
with that information?
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What is the best way to leverage that engagement?

Leveraged Engagement
There are at least two different approaches to crafting a plan for leveraging engagement:
Profile-First
1. Survey and evaluate your (existing or desired) audience.
2. Craft fan profiles that best capture their diversity.
3. Identify the mix of motivations driving each fan profile.
4. Map out the specific behaviors that appeal—or might appeal—to those profiles.
5. Revisit your lists to identify additional fan profiles and motivations that might broaden
your audience.
6. Strategize an ideal mix of franchise components designed to invite these audience
behaviors and appeal to your ideal mix of profiles, solving for specific franchise +
franchise owner needs.
Motivation-First

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Keeping in mind, of course, that one’s intended primary audience is rarely the ONLY audience that a
well-crafted storyworld will attract. Bronies in the audience, raise a hoof.
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1. Closely examine your storyworld and identify the mix of motivations that drive people to
engage with it.
2. Craft fan profiles that represent the most common mixes of these motivations.
3. Map out the specific behaviors that appeal—or might appeal—to those profiles.
4. Revisit your lists to identify additional potential fans you could reach through additional
potential motivations.
5. Strategize an ideal mix of franchise components designed to invite these audience
behaviors and appeal to your ideal mix of profiles, solving for specific franchise +
franchise owner needs.

Once you have a list of motivations and a list of profiles, a great next step is to plot them against
each other.

This image shows the motivations and profiles I listed above. Marking the primary motivation
for each fan profile with a darker dot helps to give a greater sense of which motivations are the
most common. Doing that helps inform where and how a transmedia storyworld-builder might
best focus their efforts first. Satisfying the motivations that appeal to the most fan types will be,
in theory, the most efficient way to grow one’s fanbase.
But wait – there’s something odd about the above chart. If Social and Story are major motivators
for all audience types, what’s the point in including them in the chart at all?
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The answer is simple, and is the same reason why Askwith led with the Logic of Entertainment
in his list: “The most basic desire that compels viewers to seek out and watch television
entertainment is just that: the pleasure of being entertained.”
Rule One for succeeding in, well, pretty much anything is simply, Don’t Suck.
For transmedia storyworld-builders, that means first and foremost, tell a good story. Second, tell
a good story that people will want to tell all their friends about.
These seems overly simplistic, but doing those two things will take care of those two densely-
populated rightmost columns on that chart.
“So, wait,” I hear you protesting. “How do I ensure that people will want to tell all their friends
about my storyworld?”
That’s what the leftmost four columns are for. It should go without saying, but let’s say it
anyway: delivering an amazing experience catering to Romantics will prompt the
Romantics to rave to their fellow Romantics about it. Same thing goes for every other profile
on the chart. If you deliver a something truly remarkable, people will remark on it. By
understanding motivations for engagement, you can build to that engagement, and thus leverage
existing engagement to build more engagement.
So which fan profiles should you target first? That’s harder to dictate. Different franchise owners
have different priorities, and as such different franchise owners will prioritize different audience
types differently. Your precise ranking of fan profiles and order of development is up to you, but
let’s examine how a few existing storyworlds might approach the challenge.

Case Study: LEGO
Imagine you’re a franchise manager for LEGO. You’ve been tasked with developing a new
transmedia storyworld similar to Bionicle or Ninjago. The first thing you do is sit down and
consider why people love LEGO, and as you do so you begin to create a model of who your
potential customers are.
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Surveying existing LEGO fans, you quickly discover that a large number of them are avid
collectors, and some pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for exceptionally rare or high-end sets.
A very large percentage love LEGO because of how much fun it is to simply play with them (by
themselves or with their families), and another large percentage love LEGO for its potential for
creative expression. These model makers may not buy sets for the model they’re supposed to
make, but for the special pieces they might contain that enable them to build the model they want
to make – and many of these builders then share their creations across YouTube videos,
Instagram posts and so on. This isn’t surprising – what is surprising is how many fans of LEGO
storyworlds don’t buy the sets at all, instead only watching the LEGO movies and playing LEGO
video games. Of this group, some of them are motivated to find out what happens next in the
story, and a smaller percentage are interested in the relationships between the characters.
With this insight, you realize that LEGOs appeal to Mythologists, Romantics, Completionists,
Connoisseurs, Playgrounders, Socialites and Makers.

Of these, you decide to cater first to Completionists, Connoisseurs, Playgrounders and Makers,
because your corporate overlords have dictated that your first priority be to sell more physical
LEGO sets. Should this mandate change (for example, if Disney were to buy LEGO the same
way they bought Marvel and pivot their priority to selling movies and TV shows instead of toys
or comics) then Mythologists and Romantics could abruptly become the priority – but for the
time being, the toy buyers are your first target fan profiles.
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This then leads you to start crafting fan profile strategies. You still – always! – tell a great story,
but you craft the story to showcase multiple models of toys, especially a version of that holiday
season’s $299 flagship model. You build your storyworld in such a way that it supports more
characters, more vehicles, more settings and so on than you might have originally planned. You
also start planning to incorporate a campaign where your fans can create models of their own set
in your storyworld, perhaps ordering additional special bricks online, and then sharing those
creations in a special part of your storyworld’s website.
With these clearer objectives in mind, you’re ready to proceed sketching out ideas for your
storyworld. Note that nowhere in this process have we said a word about race, age or gender.
Some of that thinking is unavoidable, but remember that two members of the same fan profile
could be radically different in race, age and gender. A 10-year-old boy in Louisiana could be as
avid a Completionist as a 64-year-old woman in Denmark. If the storyworld is sufficiently well-
designed, it can appeal to very disparate demographics for very similar reasons.

Case Study: HBO and Game of Thrones
Let’s run this thought experiment again with a different scenario. This time, imagine you’re a
franchise manager for HBO, working on Game of Thrones.
An audience analysis here is fairly straightforward. In these classes, fans of Game of Thrones are
driven primarily to find out what happens next in the story, the answers behind the story’s
longest-running mysteries (e.g., the truth behind the White Walkers, Jon Snow’s true identity,
etc.) and the endless myriad will-they-or-won’t-they romantic entanglements (e.g., Jon Snow and
Daenerys Targaryen, Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister, or, most importantly, Brienne of
Tarth and Tormund Giantsbane). Another massive percentage of Game of Thrones are in it for
the “water cooler moments,” those holy-crap-did-you-see-that scenes that everyone will be
talking about online or at work the next morning (e.g., the Red Wedding, the Red Wedding, and
no seriously the Red Wedding).
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Mythologists, Romantics and Socialites are ideal fan types for a company like HBO – or, for that
matter, Hulu or Netflix – whose business model is centered primarily around getting as many
people as possible to maintain a subscription as long as possible. Serialized narratives are ideal
for subscription business models for precisely this reason (and is one of the reason episodic
narratives are ideal as more companies embrace an entertainment-as-a-service mentality).
Unlike LEGO, HBO doesn’t sell physical artifacts – but they do license their properties to third
parties who do. For example, Sideshow Collectibles sells a $495 set with a gorgeous replica of
the astrolabe from the show’s opening credits and a very nice pop-up “Guide to Westeros” book
from Insight Editions. As soon as such licensing deals become a significant source of revenue,
then the fan profile prioritization changes accordingly – adding Connoisseurs as another
important fan profile, if not as important to HBO as Mythologists, Romantics or Socialites.
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Let’s change this scenario one more time. Now, instead of a franchise manager at HBO, you’re
George R. R. Martin, the original author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels that Game of Thrones
is based upon. As the creator of the IP, you have licensing deals in place so you get paid for
every single Game of Thrones DVD, t-shirt, collectible, knickknack, or bottle of beer.
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As such,
over time your business model has changed significantly. When you began, your primary
audience profiles were Mythologists and Romantics because you were just selling books. Now
you’re selling everything. Now Game of Thrones attracts all fan profile types, but your primary
target fan profile is Completionists, because those folks will be paying you for everything you
put out there.

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Yes, bottle of beer. As of this writing, Brewery Ommegang has eight different Game of Thrones beers:
Iron Throne Blonde Ale, Take the Black Stout, Fire and Blood Red Ale, Valar Morghulis Abbey Dubbel
Ale, Three-Eyed Raven Dark Saison Ale, Seven Kingdoms Hoppy Wheat Ale, Valar Dohaeris Tripel Ale
and Bend the Knee Golden Ale.
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The moral of this story? It’s good to be George R. R. Martin.
I say this somewhat facetiously, but also somewhat in earnest. Those storytellers who create truly
world-class transmedia storyworlds either strategically or instinctually build worlds that appeal
to many fan types. Consider J.K. Rowling and George Lucas, the authors of two of the most
impactful storyworlds in modern history. Both Harry Potter and Star Wars appeal to a
staggeringly broad range of fans, as we’ll see throughout the rest of the following chapters.

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Action: Evaluating Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement
Narrative Designers are sometimes asked to evaluate properties that are being pitched for
development. The “Evaluating” actions at the end of each chapter will compile into a toolkit for
analyzing a property as a vast transmedia storyworld. For already-developed properties, these
exercises will help you understand why it has succeeded (or not). For as-of-yet-undeveloped
properties, these exercises will help you evaluate its viability,
1. Choose an existing property and make a list of the different motivations its fans
have for loving it. Use the fan motivations from this chapter as a start, but add at
least two new ones to the list specific to your chosen property.
2. For the same storyworld, make a list of its different fan profiles. Create at least
two new fan profiles specific to your chosen property. Plot them out on a chart as
shown earlier in this chapter.
3. Imagine you are a franchise manager for this property. In a short essay, come up
with at least three possible experiences that would appeal to one or more specific
fan profiles. Be sure to describe why each experience strategically appeals to each
target fan profile, and which of their motivations it delights.

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Action: Creating Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement
Narrative Designers are often tasked with creating robust storyworlds that extend across multiple
media for a decade or more, including screens that don’t exist yet. The “Creating” actions at the
end of each chapter will compile into a toolkit for creating just such a storyworld. The results of
these actions will populate your Narrative Design Document (NDD) template from the end of
part II.
1. Identify three main fan types for your transmedia storyworld, and rank them by
their level of import to your storyworld. Enter into section 1.4 of your NDD.
2. Sketch out three types of experience designed to appeal to your three main fan
types. Enter into section 11.3 of your NDD.

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Example: Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement in Spookshow
For my sample transmedia storyworld, I decided to plan from the outset for a next-generation
“entertainment as a service” model. Whether the property lands at a company like Amazon,
Netflix, or Microsoft, or if I wind up launching it myself as a full indie production via Patreon or
Kickstarter, a subscription model for episodic, transmedia content makes the most sense to me.
Because I’m building on a subscription-based business model, I decided to focus on
Mythologists (who want to know what happens next), Romantics (who want to know how my
characters’ relationships resolve), Completionists (for transmedia connections). I also focused on
Makers as part of my personal goal of teaching these processes to others and furthering my
career as both a professor and a professional storyteller. Although I’d like to have Socialites
eventually (who will hopefully bring in new subscribers), my first goal is to create 1000 true fans
of me more than this particular storyworld, who are then more likely to support what I’m doing
next over widespread general fandom. These fans of me as an individual more than fans of the
particular storyworld are most likely to be Makers.
This gives me something like the following:

However, I also realized that because a good part of what I’m intending to do with my
transmedia storyworld has to do with my plans for new storytelling technologies and beautiful
artwork, my world actually had two additional motivations and two additional profiles to plan
for: Tech and Art, and The Technologist and The Artist.
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I described these motivations as follows:
• Tech. What does this experience do that is technologically innovative? How does the
story showcase that technological innovation, and how does the technology enable
storytelling like I’ve never seen before? Pairing your storyworld with a particular
technological innovation can create a symbiotic relationship between the two, bringing
audiences to a new platform that are primarily interested in your story, and bringing new
audiences to your story that are primarily interested in the new platform.
• Art. What about this storyworld is artistically breathtaking? What is it about the visuals,
the music, the choreography, and so on that elevates the story to new heights? Much like
technology, pairing a compelling story with mesmerizing additional artistry can have a
compounding effect on audience engagement. When top-notch artistry across multiple
elements combine, the dazzling end results can draw a myriad of audiences for a myriad
number of reasons.
The fan profiles that emerged out of them, therefore, were as follows:
• The Technologist. Primarily interested in the technological platform through which the
story is delivered. May be constantly looking for the “new new thing” in cutting-edge
technology, and looking for new “showcase” experiences they can use to show off their
latest discoveries or acquisitions. The Technologist’s primary motivation is Tech,
followed by Social and Story.

• The Artist. Attracted by other, complementary artistic aspects of the experience, such as
the art in Cuphead, the music in Portal or Journey, etc. The Artist’s primary motivation
is Art, followed by Social and Story.

This gave me the following fan profile breakdown for my storyworld:
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With this in mind, I could start designing my storyworld at both the content level and the
platform level to delight each of these fan profiles, and more, on a regular basis – thus supporting
the “entertainment as a service” business model outlined above.
While it was too early to start drafting concrete, explicit target fan profile strategies, I could
begin to brainstorm some high-level ideas at both the content and platform levels.
• Mythologists. To give Mythologists plenty of material to chew over, I began thinking
along the lines of an alternate history story. Alt-history narratives offer an almost endless
degree of what Jason Mittell calls drillability, the opportunity for audiences to dive
deeply into the story’s timeline, maps, characters, artifacts, and so on. Such deep, rich
storyworlds can easily support Encyclopedias of their own, so I began thinking of how I
might integrate an Encyclopedia for my world from the beginning.
• Romantics. In my opinion, most truly great stories are character-driven, placing multiple
interesting characters into situations that force them to make interesting (and frequently
difficult) choices and learn from the consequences. These consequences will certainly
affect the plot, but how they also affect the relationships between the characters can be
even more compelling. I knew I wanted the relationships between characters to be a
primary narrative engine for my storyworld, and the alt-history setting described above
led me to start thinking about intergenerational relationships as well as romantic ones.
This led me to start thinking about parents and children, secrets that are sometimes kept
between generations, and the damage those can do.
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• Completionists. Like George R. R. Martin in the example above, a goal of mine is to
create storyworlds that are so worthy of devotion that fans will track down everything
that I release. However, as described earlier, Discover is frequently the most difficult of
the four steps. Therefore, I wanted to create a world and an overall transmedia experience
that would support a wide range of possible things for Completionists to collect and a
straightforward system for these fan types to know what all they had already collected
and how much they still had yet to collect. This led me to start thinking again about
Panini sticker books, which are filled with numbered gaps. Kids would then buy blind
packs of stickers, which contain a random handful of numbered stickers to fill in those
gaps. I wasn’t as inclined to follow the randomized aspect of this (as a collector of
designer toys, blind boxes can be annoying), but I deeply loved the idea of being able to
see at a glance how many gaps in one’s collection one still had to fill. This led me to
revisit how I might combine the desires of Completionists and Mythologists to roll such a
“sticker book” mechanic into the Encyclopedia I described above, and potentially other
areas of my storyworld’s online experience as well. Other such areas that lend themselves
particularly well to this mechanic include a Gallery for key art, an Atlas of storyworld
maps, a Timeline, and so on.
• Makers. I already knew that I wanted to share my process for how this world was created,
so I began keeping notes on my creative progress from the get-go. I also knew that I
wanted my storyworld to prompt fans to dream up in-world stories of their own. This led
me to start thinking about being more explicit with the rules of the storyworld, to start
thinking about how I might design the storyworld to be relatively easy for cosplay design,
and so on. In short, I began thinking about how I might design the storyworld from the
beginning to be participatory.
Beyond these four core fan profiles, I also began thinking about how my storyworld might
appeal to others. I thought about how my characters might do things that Playgrounders might
want to replicate in their play patterns, I thought about how I might want to integrate new tech
like virtual reality and augmented reality into my franchise plans to appeal to Technologists, and
what unique look and feel I might adopt to appeal to Artists. Of course, all the way through I’d
been thinking about what opportunities I might give to Socialites to connect with each other and
promote my storyworld through vibrant word-of-mouth.
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Each of these fan profile strategies would need to be developed significantly further over time,
but just having these high-level goals and strategies in mind from the beginning would prove
invaluable as my storyworld began to take shape.
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2. Unique Storyworld Characteristics
Every vast transmedia storyworld has a set of unique storyworld characteristics that set it
apart from its closest competitors. This can be considered a set of rules dictating what can
or cannot happen in the storyworld. Not all characteristics must be present in every
component, but enough of them must be present to make that component recognizable as
part of the whole. Similarly, how those characteristics are implemented or incorporated
can be very broad; you can do virtually anything in a storyworld so long as that
interpretation is done in accordance with those characteristics. Joe Schrieber's horror
novel Death Troopers demonstrates that you can do zombies in Star Wars as long as it’s
done ‘in a Star Wars way'.
Unique storyworld characteristics reduce transmedia resistance by conveying to a would-
be audience member that one component of a storyworld will deliver an experience similar
to the other components in that storyworld. At its most basic, this is simple branding and
marketing; given a choice between a Star Wars comic and a new science fiction adventure
comic from an unknown storyworld, a would-be reader who likes Star Wars may be more
likely to pick up the Star Wars comic. Further, as in the example above, a component like
Death Troopers may fare better in the marketplace as would-be readers have the curiosity
piqued by the idea of seeing zombies interpreted through the lens – through the unique
storyworld characteristics – of Star Wars.

What makes Star Wars, well, Star Wars?
Perhaps more to the point, what makes Star Wars not Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Firefly? Each of
these storyworlds can be classified as science fiction. Each features space battles, weird-looking
aliens, fantastic starships… Yet all of them somehow remain recognizably very different, even
among the distant edges of their franchises.
The most successful transmedia storyworlds have very strong, well-defined unique storyworld
characteristics that make every piece of the franchise, be it a book, film, TV show, game, comic
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book, toy, app, or whatever, instantly recognizable as a part of the total franchise, even in the
absence of the logo or other branding, and equally recognizable as not part of any competing
franchise.
One way to identify a storyworld's unique characteristics is to look across multiple versions of a
storyworld. Consider a few of the versions of Superman released over the last 75 years:

These different versions are hugely divergent, with each one being primarily targeted at a
different area of a classic industry four-quadrant model:
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The animated Superman Adventures was primarily targeted at young boys, the Superman comics
have been increasingly targeted to adult men, the 1990s TV series Lois and Clark: the New
Adventures of Superman focused primarily on the romance between Clark Kent and Lois Lane
and was targeted more towards adult women, Smallville was a reimagining of Clark Kent's youth
in the eponymous small town and was targeted primarily at young adult women (hence the
promo art featuring Tom Welling's washboard abs), and Zack Snyder's Man of Steel was, as a
huge-budget investment by Warner Bros. to jumpstart their own cinematic universe, aimed at the
center of the four quadrants with a 'something for everyone' mentality (although, in keeping with
Snyder's style and Christopher Nolan's runaway success with his Batman trilogy, it definitely
skewed older and more adult). Despite the disparate target audiences for each of these versions,
all five versions have iconic elements that made each version recognizable as Superman. The
shield emblem, the colors, the poses, the powers, the characters – although they evolve greatly
over the years, with new versions adding new details to their own version of the character, there
is still a level of commonality between them that enables each different version to still be
Superman.
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Unique storyworld characteristics largely fall into one of four primary categories: core
storyworld characteristics, iconic storyworld characteristics, character storyworld
characteristics, and stylistic storyworld characteristics.

Core Storyworld Characteristics
Within the DNA of a storyworld there is usually a double helix of two things bound tightly
together, the tried-and-true storyteller’s formula x + y. This classic formula is in nearly every
“elevator pitch” in Hollywood (and, increasingly, every other branch of the entertainment
industry). Two good examples of this shorthand, according to “the Book Doctors” David Henry
Sterry and Arielle Eckstut: “Jaws in Outer Space = Alien. Ann Rice meets Gossip Girl = the
Twilight series.”
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At a basic level, most successful vast transmedia franchises have a similar x +
y formula at their core.
For example, Star Wars is science fiction plus swords and sorcery. Storyworld creator George
Lucas wasn’t very subtle about this – his heroes are Jedi knights, their weapons are light sabers,
and the Force is arguably at its most compelling when it’s at its most magical
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. It’s possible to
read the story of Luke Skywalker as Lucas’ take on The Hidden Fortress or Joseph Campbell’s
Hero of a Thousand Faces, but at its deepest core Star Wars has a surprising amount in common
with King Arthur and the knights of Camelot.
Star Trek, on the other hand, is science fiction plus exploration and naval battles. Gene
Roddenberry’s original 1964 pitch described Star Trek as “a ‘Wagon Train’ concept – built
around characters who travel to worlds ‘similar’ to our own, and meet the action-adventure-
drama which becomes our stories”. Roddenberry was citing a very popular Western TV show
that aired on NBC from 1957-62 and then continued on ABC from 1962-65, which followed a
wagon train (naturally) on its route from Missouri to California in the 1870s. A similar sense of

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Sterry 2010.
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I’d argue this is why the introduction of midichlorians in the prequel felt to many fans like such a
betrayal. Star Wars is more of the swords-and-dragons space fantasy subgenre of science fiction than the
hard science fiction subgenre, and magic (a core element of fantasy) isn’t as interesting when it’s
explained away through science.
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exploration and adventure is at the heart of every iteration of Star Trek, from the Original Series
to the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot.
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The other half of Star Trek’s DNA, however, draws more from
stories like C.S. Forester’s tales of Horatio Hornblower (in the original pitch document,
Roddenberry described the proto-Kirk hero Robert M. April as “a space-age Captain Horatio
Hornblower”)
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or Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October – a crew of a wayfaring vessel
becomes locked in ship-to-ship combat with other, competing wayfaring vessels.
Does this model work on other similar franchises? Absolutely: J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon
5 is science fiction plus political drama. Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity universe is very clearly
science fiction plus Western.
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Okay, but does this apply to non-science-fiction franchises? Absolutely: consider ER, House and
Scrubs, three long-running TV shows that, at one level, are all medical shows. Medical drama +
soap opera = ER, medical drama + mystery = House, and medical drama + sitcom = Scrubs.
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In many ways, these core storyworld characteristics function as a set of rules that determine what
can and cannot happen in the storyworld. For example, the magic-like nature of the Force is a
cornerstone of the space fantasy-style Star Wars, but having ‘magic’ appear in the more
militaristic and scientific Star Trek would feel odd unless it is done in a manner that aligns with
Star Trek’s unique storyworld characteristics – such as the ‘magic’ of Q in The Next Generation
being attributed to his alien race. Similarly, one might argue that there’s no place for zombies in
Star Wars, but then one might pick up Joe Schrieber’s 2009 Star Wars novel Death Troopers,
which found a compelling way to do it in a Star Wars way – and, in so doing, capitalize on the
zombie craze. That “in a Star Wars way” is the key bit here – even something as boundary-

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Even Deep Space Nine, which took place aboard a space station, featured exploration through a nearby
fixed wormhole to the largely unknown Gamma Quadrant.
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Roddenberry 1964, p. 5.
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When this exercise becomes difficult is when one might say that a franchise is insufficiently
differentiated from its competitors. See the “Evaluating Unique Franchise Characteristics” section at the
end of this chapter for examples – like how Syfy’s Defiance suffers from having an x + y too similar to
Firefly.
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If you’re feeling really up for a challenge, apply this same exercise to cop shows. It still works: cop
show + navy = NCIS...
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pushing as Death Troopers keeps the “science fiction plus swords and sorcery” core storyworld
characteristics intact, and then adds horror to the formula as an experiment. This is how we can
say that Death Troopers does zombies in a Star Wars way. Figure out what it means to do
something in a Star Wars way, and you’ve figured out the core storyworld characteristics of Star
Wars.
Similarly, the same process used in developing strong characters – determining how and why
each particular character acts – can also be applied to the greater world. As Sara Gwenllian-Jones
writes in her essay “Virtual Reality and Cult Television”:
In the fantastic genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction,
elaborate constructions of emphatically alternate realities are central narrative
devices, meticulously imagined and described. In literature, the fantastic
cosmologies of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hain universe,
Gene Wolfe’s Urth, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth are not merely exotic
backdrops to linear narrative events but vivid and dense semantic domains that
saturate character, themes, action, and plot. In addition to furnishing atmosphere
and the spatial dimensions that support the narrative, they also have dynamic
functions, shaping characters’ experiences, inflecting plotlines, and supporting
intricate networks of cross-connections through which narrative events resonate.
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While worlds may lack agency, worlds can still be heroes, villains, or tricksters; worlds have
philosophies, histories, and motivations; worlds have tones, moods, and nuances. The character
of worlds plays itself out in colors, in shapes, in scents, in tastes, in sounds, in textures, but
perhaps most of all in philosophies. The world of Star Trek is a fantastic one of hope and
optimism; the world of The X-Files is a more realistic one of dark cynicism; and the world of
Labyrinth is an erratic one of magic and humor. An extension to the Star Trek universe that’s a
slasher movie like Friday the 13th would be jarring; an extension to The X-Files that featured
Mulder and Scully trying to restore a mystic balance in an elven kingdom would be odd; a
Labyrinth extension with David Bowie running around on a spaceship with a lightsaber would be

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Gwenllian-Jones and Pearson 2004, p. 83.
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deeply bizarre. This is not to say that each of these stories couldn’t happen – in fact, some of
these could be incredibly interesting – but they would need to be done in such a way that they
made concessions to remain consistent with the tone of the world. A Star Trek slasher story
could be done within the confines of the holodeck;
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an X-Files high fantasy story could be set
within a virtual reality or via a dream sequence brought about by an Indian shaman; I’m sure a
more gifted storyteller than I could figure out a way for a Labyrinth science fiction film to be
done… Somehow. Again, it would all come down to figuring out what it means to do a science
fiction film in a Labyrinth way.

Iconic Franchise Characteristics
Many core x + y themes manifest themselves in certain iconic items or iconic elements that
become not only inseparable from the franchise, but come to be recognized as a shorthand for the
franchise as well.
For example, consider the weapons in Star Trek and Star Wars: where Star Wars has knights
with lightsabers for swords, Star Trek has naval officers with phasers for pistols. A lightsaber is
an iconic element of the Star Wars franchise, just as a phaser is an iconic element of the Star
Trek franchise. Both weapons are thematically resonant with the core storyworld characteristic of
its franchise.
Consider also how the spaceships in the two science fiction storyworlds are radically different –
in a nutshell, Star Wars has cockpits and Star Trek has bridges. In Star Wars, the spaceships are
almost like horses whose personalities are extensions of their primary riders/pilots – Han Solo’s
Millennium Falcon is a hot rod and Luke’s X-wing fighter is a WWII dogfighting plane. In Star
Trek, the Enterprise feels less like an entity with a personality of its own (or an extension of its
captain’s personality) and more like an enormous submarine or three-masted schooner – again,
resonating with the core storyworld characteristic of science fiction + exploration and naval

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As Jenkins pointed out to me, “Classic Star Trek had no shortage of horror and monster stories. The
best example of what happens to monsters in a Trek universe would be the Classic episode, ‘Devil in the
Dark.’” I’m reminded more of Species 8472 from the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Scorpion.” Behold –
our generation gap, on full display…
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battles. All three ships can function as a shorthand for their franchises – the Enterprise is just as
much a recognizable symbol of Star Trek as the Millennium Falcon or an X-wing fighter is for
Star Wars.
Nearly every massive transmedia story franchise has such iconic objects. The Warthog vehicle,
needler weapon and Master Chief’s helmet are icons for Halo, the chainsaw-tipped lancer
weapon is an icon for Gears of War, the power sword is an icon for Masters of the Universe, the
throne of swords is an icon for Game of Thrones, the hidden blades and beaked hood are icons
for Assassin’s Creed, the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver are icons for Doctor Who, and so
on. Consider how each of these iconic elements represents the unique storyworld characteristics
of each storyworld – the chainsaw-tipped Lancer gun symbolizes the over-the-top nature of
Gears of War, the hidden blades symbolizes the stealth and secrecy of Assassin’s Creed, and the
space-traveling police box and sonic screwdriver symbolize the humor (and frequent outright
silliness) of Doctor Who.
Of course, sometimes the most iconic storyworld characteristics are just that – icons. The
multiple subfranchises within Assassin’s Creed each use a variant of the A-shaped assassin’s
crest, every version of Ghostbusters has used the ‘no-ghost’ symbol,
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and each subfranchise
within the Transformers story universe has had a variant upon the heroic Autobot and the evil
Decepticon faction symbols. Such faction symbols are arguably the most common type of
recurring icon within franchises – consider the snake logo of the villainous Cobra across the
multiple versions of G.I. Joe, the sigils of the multiple warring houses in Game of Thrones, or
the house crests and colors in Harry Potter. Such symbols are very useful tools for characters to
display their allegiances within the storyworld – and for components (and fans!) to display their
alliances to their story franchise, and to each other.
Such icons are also frequently used as a visual shorthand for a particular character within a
storyworld, a practice very commonly used in comics. Superman’s S shield, Batman’s bat logo,
Wonder Woman’s double W’s, Green Lantern’s ring – all of these function as logos for a
particular character, which is useful when the artist rendering that character can change from

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Except the Filmation version, which was done by a different company with a wholly different story
universe and creative team, and was the reason why the animated version of the film storyworld was
called The Real Ghostbusters. Talk about transmedia resistance.
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month to month, or when a book’s cover needs to be recognizable at a glance and picked out
from a crowded shelf. That said, having a character function as a unique storyworld
characteristic can be problematic, and inherently limiting, if not handled properly.

Character Storyworld Characteristics
Yes, “character characteristics” is lousy English. Hang on, because that’s only the beginning of
how thorny this area can be.
It’s difficult to address ‘character’ as a unique element of a franchise because characters are
critically important to the success of any story and huge, long-running blockbuster entertainment
franchises are frequently built around characters like James Bond, Batman, the Doctor from
Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes. There is no question that vibrant, engaging characters are
hugely important to successful transmedia franchises.
However, any single character should not be considered a unique storyworld characteristic
because a character is not a storyworld. A storyworld must be bigger than any one particular
character if said storyworld is to achieve the mammoth, grandiose scale that is the hallmark of
truly epic transmedia story franchises.
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Ideally, a truly vast storyworld will support multiple
primary characters that can give rise to subfranchises within the main franchise.
Take, for example, Captain Kirk. Kirk is very clearly an icon for Star Trek, and the Star Trek
storyworld did extremely well with Kirk at the helm.
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However, consider how much bigger the
Star Trek storyworld has become. Countless stories have unfurled within the Star Trek
storyworld in almost every medium imaginable, and of those tales only a portion feature James
Tiberius Kirk or the original crew of the Enterprise. For that matter, we cannot say that Kirk,
Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, or any of the scores of other memorable Star Trek characters are
unique storyworld characteristics for Star Trek because if they were, they should be present in
every story for that story to be identifiable as a part of the franchise. Instead, Kirk functions as a

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I’ll address this at length in the “Extensible Narrative Architecture” and “Extensible Characters”
chapters.
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See what I did there?
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unique storyworld characteristic for the subfranchise of the original series, Picard for The Next
Generation, Sisko for Deep Space Nine, and so on.
There are characters out there that are the central figures of every component of their transmedia
franchise – the best examples being, perhaps, James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Sherlock Holmes.
What subfranchises exist are primarily spun out of the multiple stages of the characters’ lives,
such as the (canonically dubious) Young Bond transmedia subfranchise by Charlie Higson, the
Young Indiana Jones TV show, or Laurie R. King’s books about Mary Russell’s adventures with
a semi-retired Sherlock Holmes. The trouble with these approaches is that, again, it limits the
potential scope of the franchise to the character’s lifetime. King could continue telling stories
about Russell after Holmes’ inevitable passing (after all, Russell is 15 and Holmes is 54 when
they first meet in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice) but then they would be Mary Russell stories, not
Sherlock Holmes stories. Similarly, many fans felt their hackles rise at the implication that
Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull was laying the groundwork for the aging Harrison Ford to
literally pass Indy’s hat on to Shia LeBoeuf, because LaBoeuf’s character Mutt isn’t Indy.
Returning to Bond, filmmakers keep bringing Bond back over and over by recasting the role and
playing fast and loose with the timeline. Framing the Bond epic as one unified, endless
transmedia story stretches even the most willing suspension of disbelief to its limits unless 007 is
also secretly, as some Whovian fans and scholars like to joke, an immortal Time Lord.
Which brings us to Doctor Who as the ultimate counterexample. Like Bond, Doctor Who has
been going on for over 50 years – but in a brilliant flash of foresight, some showrunner at the
BBC made the Time Lords, of whom the Doctor is the last, not only nigh-immortal but able to
regenerate into new bodies. This allowed the role to be recast whenever the actor decided it was
time to move on (or a ratings slump made that decision for them, or the showrunners decided the
actor was asking for too much money) without any of the nasty continuity headaches. Clearly,
the Doctor is the ultimate character storyworld characteristic, right?
Only sort of. True, Doctor Who is one of the longest-running, most successful transmedia
franchises in history – but the fallacy here is that the Doctor doesn’t have to be in every Doctor
Who story for it to be recognizable as such. In fact, over the years Doctor Who has spawned
multiple successful subfranchises, including Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures and K-9
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and Company.
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The Doctor Who universe is so vast and rich that the Doctor himself doesn’t
have to be in all of it. Even when the Doctor finally meets his or her end, there can still be new
stories told in the Whoniverse. At that point, the challenge becomes one of branding.

So what are “character storyworld characteristics”, if not individual characters? Think of
character storyworld characteristics as types of characters, or classes of characters. Again, this is
the most obvious in science fiction and fantasy. Lieutenant Worf may not be a character
storyworld characteristic of Star Trek, but Klingons are certainly iconic storyworld
characteristics of Star Trek, which is one of the reasons why fans were so anxious (and
inevitably displeased) about how JJ Abrams reintroduced them in his 2013 sequel Star Trek: Into
Darkness, or how they were treated in 2017's Star Trek: Discovery. Doctor Who is rife with
iconic character classes such as the Daleks and the Cybermen, Hogwarts' Houses are iconic
character classes in Harry Potter, and the character class of “Jedi” for Star Wars is about as
iconic as they come.
Not every episode inside of the storyworld has to include all of these character types, of course,
but I’d argue that every successful subfranchise that feels of a piece with the larger franchise
addresses these iconic character classes in some capacity at some time. Seeing just how those
character classes are addressed, as the Klingons were in Star Trek: Into Darkness or Star Trek:
Discovery, is a huge part of the fun. We'll dive deeper into this in a few chapters in Extensible
Character Design and much later in the section on what Henry Jenkins calls multiplicity, but first
let’s examine the how of a franchise – in other words, the style with which the story is told.

Stylistic Storyworld Characteristics
A unique storyworld characteristic can sometimes be stylistic, especially in more visual or
audiovisual media. This is more than simply the appearance of the characters,
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and describes the
overall look and feel of the franchise. As Scott Bukatman writes about style in comics:

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Again, much more on this in the chapters on “Extensible Narrative Architecture” and “Extensible
Characters”.
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As with diverse styles of writing, different visual styles create different aesthetic
experiences and different worlds, often more rapidly than prose. Some of the
formal elements that define and structure worlds in comics include the quality of
line, the use (or nonuse) of color, the slickness of the production, the number and
regularity of panels on the page, the acceptance or rejection of the grid, the size of
the page, the legibility of panel transitions, the presence or absence of text, the
placement and style of text, and the overall sense of unity or disjunction that the
comic imparts. The medium unavoidably undercuts any pretense of objectivity, as
every line reveals the literal hand of the author.
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A unique stylistic storyworld characteristic is rarely seen consistently across vast transmedia
franchises, partly because such franchises rarely share the same art director, but also because a
‘look’ in one medium does not always translate well into another. Let us follow Bukatman’s lead
and consider several comic book franchises that have had feature film adaptations.
Mike Mignola is an artist whose style has developed over the years into something breathtaking
in its minimalism and studies of color. Mignola’s best-known creation is Hellboy, a series of
graphic novels about the life (and afterlife) of a demon summoned to Earth as a baby by Nazis in
WWII, and then rescued and adopted by a group of Allied soldiers. Since it first appeared in
1993, Hellboy has become a smash hit among indie comics, generating not only solid sales of his
own title (published by Dark Horse) but also giving rise to multiple spin-off titles and licensed
adaptations into video games, animation and – perhaps most famously – two feature films
directed by Guillermo del Toro. Mignola’s trademark style is so stark and distinctive that
adapting it to other media has only rarely been attempted,
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and even the spin-off comics (and a

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See the chapter on “Extensible Characters” for much more on that.
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Bukatman 2016, pp. 29-30.
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The Amazing Screw-On Head, an animated pilot for the Sci-Fi Channel in 2006, attempted this feat and
succeeded admirably. That the pilot wasn’t picked up is one of the great crimes against quality television:
not only was the oddball black comedy written and produced by Wonderfalls’ and Pushing Daisies’
Bryan Fuller, the cast included Paul Giamatti as the lead, David Hyde Pierce as the villain, and Patton
Oswalt, Molly Shannon, and Mindy Sterling in supporting roles. The DVD was released in 2007.
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long stretch in the middle of the Hellboy comic’s run) done by other artists did not attempt to
replicate Mignola’s handiwork. This suggests that something so unique to one artist is near-
impossible to pull off when done by someone else, especially in another medium.
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Or is it? Another comic book artist who has mastered such a minimalistic style is Frank Miller.
Miller’s jaw-dropping 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns showcased his grim-and-gritty
storytelling in both its narrative and art, and his 1987 follow-up Batman: Year One cemented it.
Both of these books remain bestsellers for DC Comics, but soon after their release Miller left to
pursue his own creator-owned titles. In 1991, Miller debuted Sin City, which was heavily
influenced in both tone and visuals by film noir. Miller took the aesthetics of film noir and
galvanized them for comics, so much so that capturing the super-stylized feeling of Sin City in
live-action film seemed impossible. However, Robert Rodriguez stepped up to the challenge in
2005, utilizing heavily stylized cinematography and a unique color processing technique to bring
Miller’s unique aesthetic to life. Zack Snyder took this one step further with his own 2006
adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel 300. If Sin City or 300 had extended the original storyworlds
instead of adapting (or, as per Rodriguez, ‘translating’) them, the stylistic bond between the
comic and the film would make for an ideal transmedia storytelling case study.

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Also, Mignola famously urged others to do their own take on Hellboy in their adaptations instead of
aping his style. For more on Hellboy as a case study in transmedia storytelling, see the upcoming section
on Multiplicity and the “Collaborative Authorship” chapter.
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Evaluating Unique Storyworld Characteristics
How might one best discern what the unique characteristics of a given storyworld are, or to
evaluate whether or not a would-be storyworld has sufficient unique characteristics to stand the
test of time?
A great test is to imagine the “box art” for each of the storyworld's extensions stripped of its logo.
If the branding is removed, is the comic easily identifiable as part of the same storyworld as the
feature film? If the branding is removed, is the TV show identifiable as part of the same
storyworld as the video game? For Star Trek and Star Wars, much of this comes down to
trademark elements: if there’s a lightsaber on the box art, it’s probably not a Star Trek story!
A storyworld's unique characteristics can be thrown into sharp relief when the storyworld is
either lampooned or mashed up with something else. The iconic elements of Star Wars have long
been an easy target for satirical spoofs from other well-known IPs. Jim Henson did a Star Wars
themed episode of The Muppet Show in 1980, Seth Green’s stop-motion animation show Robot
Chicken produced a Star Wars special in 2007, and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy has produced
spoofs of all three of the original Star Wars trilogy (Blue Harvest [2007]; Something, Something,
Something Dark Side [2009]; and It’s a Trap! [2010]). These stories may not be canonical, but
they are recognizably based on Star Wars through their inclusion of (albeit simplified and
goofier) versions of iconic Star Wars elements like lightsabers, X-wing fighters and so on.
I mentioned Joe Schrieber’s 1999 Star Wars-with-zombies novel Death Troopers earlier – even
though ‘zombies’ is nowhere near the core DNA of the Star Wars franchise, Death Troopers still
remains identifiable as a component of the Star Wars universe due to the “Star Wars way” with
which the book approached the subject matter. The book’s cover art features a stormtrooper
helmet (one of the franchise’s icons), bloodied and hanging from a hook. This makes the book
instantly identifiable as a Star Wars horror story.
When a storyworld doesn’t sufficiently differentiate itself from its competitors, it significantly
weakens the IP. One example of a poorly differentiated franchise is Syfy’s Defiance. The
primary unique characteristic to Defiance is in its mechanics, how it combines a TV show with a
video game – but if either the TV show or the game is experienced alone, that uniqueness all but
disappears. When and if such hybrids become more popular, that uniqueness will evaporate
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completely, and then all that’s left is the x + y of the storyworld itself. Defiance’s x + y is
primarily science fiction + Western, which, as we’ve seen, is also the primary x + y of
Firefly/Serenity. Stripped of its branding, the Defiance universe looks an awful lot like the
Firefly universe – particularly its use of a near-identical shabby aesthetic. Granted, Defiance has
more aliens, less swearing in Chinese, and is primarily set on Earth instead of in deep space, but
for the most part Defiance could be a Deep Space Nine-style extension to Firefly.
More proof of this can be found in Sega’s tie-in video game for Iron Man 2, which is set after the
events of the feature film. To their credit, Sega managed to get Marvel Iron Man comic book
writer Matt Fraction to do the script and to get both Don Cheadle and Samuel L. Jackson to
reprise their roles of James “Rhodey” Rhodes and Nick Fury – but they failed to get Robert
Downey Jr. As a result, the dialogue and plot fit well, and the secondary characters fit well, but
without the unique storyworld characteristics of Robert Downey Jr.’s distinctive voice, humor
and timing, the game just doesn’t feel like Iron Man. The loss of Downey, especially in the
presence of Jackson and Cheadle, shattered my suspension of disbelief and raised my transmedia
resistance, instead of lowering it.

Creating Unique Storyworld Characteristics
Unique storyworld characteristics are sometimes difficult to nail down when creating a
storyworld, but doing so is critically important. A storyteller will often seek to situate their work
within the comfortable confines of a genre (space battles, weird-looking aliens, fantastic
starships), but without a healthy dose of uniqueness, the creation risks being seen as too
derivative. It’s not enough to simply check off the boxes of a genre and expect something to
succeed – it needs to have its own special hook to make (increasingly jaded) audiences sit up and
take notice, to make them rediscover those loved genre tropes by reinterpreting them in new and
interesting ways. So how do you do that?

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Core Franchise Characteristics
Consider Firefly and Babylon 5: both have similar x + y formulas at their cores, and both also
demonstrate how sometimes creating a new take on a genre can be as simple as identifying a
“minor theme” inside of an existing franchise and building it up into your major one. Firefly is,
of course, science fiction plus Western, but Firefly can also be read as Joss Whedon’s fantasy
reimagining of Star Wars with the smugglers-and-hot-rods element dialed way up and the
swords-and-sorcery element dialed way down. Similarly, Babylon 5 is science fiction plus
political dramas like The West Wing, but can also be read as J. Michael Straczynski’s reworking
of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the political intrigue dialed way up and the exploration
dialed way down.
A great exercise is to identify which other properties exist in your target space, and then analyze
each one in order to zero in on a unique space to claim as your own.
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What is your storyworld’s
competition? What are each competing property’s core storyworld characteristics? What is each
one’s x + y? What are its major themes? What are its influences and ‘ancestors’? Once you
identify those, it’s possible to brainstorm ways to pivot in interesting directions. What would
Star Wars become if it wasn’t science fiction + swords and sorcery, but science fiction + tommy
guns and stage magic? Boom! Instant hook. What would Star Trek become if the primary
characters were the medical officers? House in space? Boom! Instant hook.
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Iconic Franchise Characteristics
One way to start thinking about what your storyworld’s iconic storyworld characteristics might
be is to ask yourself what you’d really, really love to see made as a toy, model, costume, or other
tangible replica. The lightsabers for Star Wars and the phasers for Star Trek are low-hanging
fruit. For Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, this might be Harry Dresden’s duster coat, blasting
rod or confidant Bob the skull. For Game of Thrones, this might be the throne itself or Daenerys
Targeryn’s dragon eggs. These are geeky examples, but they don’t have to be – for The West

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In a way, it’s much like writing book proposals.
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Incidentally, this also makes an awesome party game for writers.
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Wing, it might be the rubber ball that Josh bounced against his office wall to get Toby’s attention,
or for House it might be his cane (or his piano, but that would be a bear to ship).
These are the iconic objects that come to represent these characters and their storyworlds, but
they also function as symbols for the characteristics of these characters and worlds as well. For
example, Harry Dresden’s duster is symbolic of his being a very guarded type of guy due to both
his emotional history and his living in a dangerous world, his blasting rod is symbolic of his
temper and his need to wage combat, and Bob the skull is symbolic of both the supernatural
elements of the world and the humor of the stories (the talking skull’s name is Bob, after all). It’s
not enough to simply have an object that appears repeatedly in your story – it must mean
something, come to mean something, or mean something to the characters and their world. Only
then will such a symbol mean anything to your audience, which is really what this is all about.
Think hard about not just what toys, costumes or other artifacts you’d love to see made from
your storyworld – think about what characters in your storyworld would think or feel when they
see those things, and then what your fans will think or feel when they see those things. Pick the
right objects and imbue them with the right meaning, and you’re well on your way to having
great icons for your franchise.

Character Franchise Characteristics
The easy question here: who are your main characters? Who are they most like in other
franchises? How do they differ from those similar “peers”?
For example, say your storyworld is build around a lovable rogue/scoundrel. There’s nothing
wrong with that – countless IPs are built around similar characters, including Indiana Jones,
Uncharted, and Firefly. Of course, that’s also the problem – what makes your rogue/scoundrel
different from their rogue/scoundrels? How do those differences reflect the differences in the rest
of your storyworld? Which secondary characters from your storyworld’s competitors might stand
on their own as primary characters if the overall storyworld was different? What differences in
the storyworld would that require? Answer those questions, and you’re on your way to creating
something new.
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Returning to Whedon’s Firefly, it’s easy to imagine this IP as essentially what Star Wars might
have been like if Han Solo was the hero instead of Luke Skywalker, and the rest of the property
was reshaped around him. However, compare Han Solo with Malcolm Reynolds in your head for
a moment, and think about what makes them similar, and what makes them different – as
evidenced by the differences between Solo and Firefly. Han’s more of a cowboy, whereas Mal is
more of a defeated war hero. Both are perfectly willing to shoot first,
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but Mal has more of a
personal code, nobility and honor to him than Han. The storyworld built around Mal reflects
those core differences – especially the sense of deep loss and “home is where you can find or
build it” in Firefly. All of the other characters in Firefly are touched by that similar sense of loss,
and how they’re all dealing with it in different ways. That sense of cobbling together a life, if not
a family, is at the core of both Mal and Firefly. Some of that comes through in Solo as well, but
by the end of the film Han has been betrayed by virtually everyone but Chewie – leaving Solo
less about family and more about a lone cowboy, his dog (Chewie) and his horse (the Falcon).
Similarly, think about the Batman storyworld, which may be one of the best case studies in
unique storyworld characteristics.

Case Study: Batman
At its core, the x + y of Batman is arguably detective noir + technothriller. The unique
storyworld characteristics of the Batman subfranchise within the DC comics universe is how
Batman has no superhuman powers, except for a near-inexhaustible bank account. When young
Bruce Wayne lost his parents in a chaotic crime, he trained himself to become the world’s
greatest force for order, using his resources and engineering genius to become a world-class
detective and athlete, and develop an arsenal of bat-themed equipment and weaponry to embrace
fear as his main weapon for order. Each of Batman’s sidekicks follow a similar pattern – no

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Special editions be damned.
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superpowers, but nearly world-class athleticism and deductive powers.
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A Robin with
superpowers wouldn’t fit in the Batman corner of the DC Comics universe nearly as well.
More telling is how the most long-lived and high-profile of Batman’s rogue’s gallery also
follows this pattern. The Joker has no superpowers, but is a world-class criminal mastermind
with a near-endless supply of giant coins, poison-squirting boutonnieres and other gag-themed
toys that he uses in similarly gag-themed heists – and is the perfect dark mirror to Batman, using
his gleeful chaos to oppose Batman’s fearful order. Harvey Dent’s Two-Face is a fallen district
attorney, whose perpetual internal struggle between order and chaos manifests itself in his two-
themed crimes, appearance, and obsession with flipping a coin. The Penguin is a world-class
gangster and mob boss with a near-endless supply of bird-themed toys and crimes. Catwoman is
a world-class cat burglar with a more limited but still impressive collection of cat-themed stuff
and targets. All four are types of characters that a cop or detective would traditionally encounter,
dialed up to 11 and then given a theme and a bunch of stuff and behavior patterns that adhere to
that theme.
The absence of the unique storyworld characteristics can also be a warning sign. Batman’s lesser
rogues all deviate from the IP’s unique storyworld characteristics in different ways: Mr. Freeze is
a mad scientist, and “cop vs. mad scientist” isn’t as resonant as “cop vs. criminal mastermind”,
“cop vs. mob boss” or “cop vs. burglar”. The same goes for Poison Ivy (“cop vs. ecoterrorist”) or
Killer Croc (“cop vs. monster”). Clayface gets closer to the mark with “cop vs. master of
disguise”, but is thematically weakened because Clayface does have superpowers, and thus
violates the ‘no-powers’ storyworld characteristic. Again, the same goes for Poison Ivy and
Killer Croc. The introduction of Bane in the 1990s was somewhat resonant because of how well
it fit with the “cops vs. drug dealers” tone of the War on Drugs, but Bane was weakened by the
challenge of giving him an endless supply of either drug- or luchadore-themed gadgets. The
same could be said for Mr. Zasz – “cop vs. serial killer” works very well, but it’s hard to give
Zasz an arsenal of scar-themed weapons and toys. Pitting Batman against Ra’s al Ghul in
Batman Begins or Bane in The Dark Knight Rises was interesting, but the thematic resonance

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None of the Robins have had the same financial wherewithal to date, of course, but as they tend to be
Bruce Wayne’s wards, we can chalk that up to Bruce being stingy with their allowances.
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between the character of Batman and the characters of Joker and Two-Face will, I expect, be
what keeps The Dark Knight on “best-of” lists for decades to come.
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However, you mustn’t stop there. It’s simple enough to ask who your main characters will be.
It’s more complicated, but arguably vastly more important, to ask who your main character
classes will be. Again, think about Star Trek – the primary character classes there aren’t just
Klingons and Vulcans, although they’re critically important – it’s also the engineers, science
officers, and other roles that are played aboard the starships. It’s no accident that each of these
classes of Starfleet officer has their own color-coded uniform – these are just as much of iconic
storyworld characteristics as the school crests in Harry Potter. When people fans cosplay for
Star Trek, many of them don’t dress up as Kirk or Spock, they dress up as who they’d be in Star
Trek, usually starting with the type of officer they’d be.
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What are the unique factions or groups
in your storyworld? What bonds them together? How did they first form? What do they value?
What do they oppose? How do they identify themselves to each other? What do they all have in
common, and what makes them fit – or not fit – within the larger character of your storyworld?

Stylistic Franchise Characteristics
Style is a difficult thing to create deliberately. As someone wise once said, “style is the mistakes
we make.” Try too hard to create a style, and you’ll come off looking like you’re, well, trying too
hard.
Still, there are things you can do to establish a sense of thematic resonance throughout your work,
which is the next best thing. Try finding artists whose work you admire, who seem to have a
style, and think hard about what makes their stuff work. Listen to them speak, whenever possible,
about their work. For example, pick up the Criterion Collection versions of Guillermo del Toro’s

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Not to discount the tragic Heath Ledger aspect of the film, of course.
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Much more on this in the “Collaborative Authorship” part of the book.
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films. Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’y Labyrinth all hold treasured positions in my
personal library, because del Toro, especially on these editions, provides some of the best
director’s commentary tracks in the business. Of particular note is his notion of “visual rhyme,”
where he talks about his use of colors and objects to create resonance between characters, parts
of his films, and sometimes even between multiple movies themselves.
Style isn’t so much what you say as how you say it, so think carefully about how you say things.
Think about how what you’re saying in a piece resonates with, or is dissonant with, the way that
you’re saying it. Think about how your textual style might be represented visually, or how your
visual style might be represented aurally. For example, Dave McKean’s beautifully eclectic
visual style has repeatedly been a magnificent complement to the eclectic nature of Neil
Gaiman’s text (as evidenced by such works as Black Orchid, The Tragical Comedy or Comical
Tragedy of Mr. Punch, and The Wolves in the Walls), which was then complemented perfectly
again by Iain Bellemy’s similarly eerie, disjointed music for Gaiman and McKean’s film
Mirrormask. When there is a stylistic resonance, if not a pure stylistic consistency, throughout an
entire transmedia story franchise then it will feel organic, completely of a piece.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to identifying what makes your storyworld unique, and
then creating an organic, elegant application of those unique characteristics across the entire
transmedia story franchise. By creating a strong core set of unique storyworld characteristics,
you will ensure that your storyworld will not only be identifiable as consistent, organic and
complete, but that it will be extensible for years, if not decades, to come.

Action: Evaluating Unique Franchise Characteristics
1. Choose a storyworld. What two (or more) genres does it combine for its unique x
+ y? Don’t mix story genre with gameplay genre, if evaluating games.
2. What are its closest competitors? What is the x + y for each one? How are they
different from the x + y of this franchise?
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3. What does it mean to do something “in this storyworld's way”? Pick something
that seems completely unrelated to the franchise (like zombies in Star Wars) and
then describe about how you’d do it in this storyworld.

Action: Creating Unique Storyworld Characteristics
1. Choose an X+Y combination genre for your storyworld (e.g., space opera +
romantic comedy, high fantasy + Western, etc.). Enter into the Exec Summary of
your Narrative Design Document (NDD).
2. Identify your storyworld's three closest competitors and list those competitors’
X+Ys and their genre(s). Enter into section 1.2. of your NDD.
3. Choose a unique X+Y for your storyworld in your chosen genre. Enter into
section 1.2. of your NDD.
4. Make a rough list of some possible unique storyworld characteristics for your
storyworld. Set aside for later.
5. Select an overall aesthetic for your storyworld. Start a “mood board” for it. Enter
text and at least three sample images into section 1.5 of your NDD.

Example: Unique Storyworld Characteristics in Spookshow
When I first began to develop Spookshow, I had an idea that I wanted something like a YA
version of Carnivale, Daniel Knauf’s darkly magical realist show for HBO that ran from 2003 to
2005. I loved the show’s Great Depression aesthetic, as well as its sense of a traveling circus that
was much more than it seemed, tied into larger stories of magic and monsters.
I also knew that I wanted something evocative of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the period
mystery drama from the Australian Broadcasting Company that began in 2012. I loved the strong
female protagonist who used her head and her skills to lead everyone else – particularly the men
– out of trouble. I wanted that kind of protagonist for my story, especially moving forward;
someone drawn from the same well as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter or Disney’s Moana. I
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also knew that I wanted her love interest(s) to be strong, capable but truly brilliant men, men
who rivaled her own intelligence albeit in different ways, so they complemented her instead of
competing with her.
There were other crucial storyworlds in the mix – Harry Potter was a big one, of course, as well
as Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (which is why the small town at the
beginning of Spookshow is named Bradbury), and I worried that Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries
might be too obscure, so the x + y shorthand I chose for Spookshow was "YA alt-history +
supernatural adventure," or “Carnivale + Harry Potter.” As it turned out, this was the source of
some distress.
In one of those funny little quirks of the universe, Spookshow was set to make its public debut as
part of an exhibition of Media Arts and Practice doctoral student work the same weekend that
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them had its premiere. As I continued to develop and polish
my world, I fretted over whether the world I’d built would be perceived as being too close to J.K.
Rowling’s. There was no point in arguing that mine was its own animal if they were – one does
not enter into an arena of perception with one of the bestselling, best-loved authors in the world
and expect to survive. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried; Rowling’s take on the Wizarding
World during the inter-war period shared a gloss of Art Deco and magic with mine, but mine was
a different, darker take. Whereas magic is still very secret in Rowling’s world, in magicians were
forced into service by the Germans at the end of World War I, made to wipe out the Western
United States, and the world was remade both geographically and politically as a result. In many
ways, my take on this period differed from Rowling’s as much as Rowling’s differed from, say,
Susanna Clarke’s in Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell. Where we all shared the same X, our
Ys were all sufficiently different for them to be unique.
This uniqueness was also brought forward in the stylistic unique storyworld characteristics – that
is, the distinct look and feel I chose for my storyworld. My chosen design aesthetic going in was
to do something inspired by the Universal classic monster films of the time – The Mummy,
Dracula, Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and so on – as well as the beautiful
black and white line art of Edward Gorey, who not only did the original Addams Family
cartoons but the illustrations for John Bellairs’ wonderfully gothic children’s books like The
House with the Clock in its Walls.
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James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein is a study in shapes and silhouettes.
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Edward Gorey's moody black-and-white line drawings are exquisite in their all-ages eeriness.
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I also wanted to do something similar to what Mike Mignola accomplished with Hellboy in his
use of a sharply curtailed palette, which is why the art in Spookshow is primarily blacks and
whites with pops of shades of one color per illustration. It’s worked well in the spot illustrations
I’ve done for the prototype, but I’m aware this might or might not fly in the final animation; it’s
something I’m very curious to test.
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Mike Mignola's Hellboy achieves similar mood with a strictly limited palette.

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My final major influences were Olly Moss, whose poster work I’d loved even before he served
as the main artist for Campo Santo’s gorgeous game Firewatch, and Michael Schwab, whose
posters for the California State Parks are almost iconic in their stunning use of few colors and big,
blocky, silhouetted shapes. Fusing these influences together into an approach of my own that
could serve as a unique style across Spookshow became a major goal of the project as I moved
forward.

Olly Moss' Mondo posters for the Harry Potter series are stunning.
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Michael Schwab's poster designs for the California National Parks are nothing short of iconic.

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3. World-Centric Narrative Design (with a Human Lens at the
Center)
Many storytellers use a character-centric narrative design approach, starting with a great
character and then craft stories of that character’s adventures. This approach can be
overly limiting, resulting in a traditional series instead a storyworld which supports
multiple characters with their own subfranchises.
World-centric narrative design begins with an initial “what if,” a core deviation from reality.
To test out such a scenario, storytellers create a human lens, a character in that world. As
the storyteller explores all the ways that deviation from reality impacts that character’s life,
new insights emerge and add detail to the imagined world. As this development proceeds,
multiple characters may react to the central deviation in different ways – and when those
reactions are in direct conflict with one another, then big, powerful stories may emerge.
For example, one primary “What if?” of Star Wars is the existence of the Force. If the
Force existed, and you could tap into it to do amazing, magical things, how should you use
that power? One character might believe that the Force should be used to improve the lives
of everyone, whereas another might believe that the Force should be used purely for selfish
purposes. Out of this philosophical conflict comes the narrative conflict of the Jedi versus
the Sith.
Similarly, world-centric narrative design reduces transmedia resistance by supporting the
creation of multiple subfranchises built around the same deviations from reality. Star Wars
succeeds as a vast storyworld because it isn’t just the adventures of Luke Skywalker, but
the tales of a huge cast of characters whose lives are impacted by the existence of the Force,
among other deviations from reality. Audiences can be convinced to invest their energy in
another section of a vast storyworld, another subfranchise, by the promise of a compelling
new take on that “What if?”

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From Plot to Character to World
The next aesthetic of successful transmedia storyworlds is hinted at in that very phrase: they are
story worlds. The rise of transmedia storytelling is part of a larger evolution in story emphasis
from plot to character to world.
In Part VI of Aristotle's Poetics, the Greek philosopher ranks the importance of a dramatic
tragedy’s components as follows:
Virtually all tragedians, one might say, use these formal elements; for in fact
every drama alike has spectacle, character, plot, diction, song and reasoning.
But the most important of them is the structure of the events. Tragedy is not an
imitation of persons, but of actions and of life. Well-being and ill-being reside
in action, and the goal of life is an activity, not a quality; people possess certain
qualities in accordance with their character, but they achieve well-being or its
opposite on the basis of how they fare. So the imitation of character is not the
purpose of what the agents do; character is included along with and on account
of the actions. So the events, i.e. the plot, are what tragedy is there for, and that
is the most important thing of all. […] So the plot is the source and (as it were)
the soul of tragedy; character is second.
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Aristotle is arguing that it’s more important to focus on the actions of the players (the what
happens, the plot) rather than on the qualities (the personalities and emotions) that distinguish
the players onstage into separate characters. It's possible to tell a rousing story of two nations at
war and focus on the action without ever really getting to know any of the generals or soldiers on
the battlefield. Such a story certainly might be greatly improved by the addition of character
depth, better enabling the audience to identify with the players, but without plot, without actions
upon the stage, drama falls apart.
Over time, however, certain characters grew to be very popular, and audiences demanded more
stories starring early mythological heroes like Hercules. As this happened, storytelling saw a

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Aristotle 1997, pp. 11-12.
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shift in emphasis from plot to character – or towards characters that could support multiple
stories.
Soon audiences began to demand stories that featured multiple recurring characters, and stories
in which their favorite heroes team up. In short, the demand rose for entire mythos, storyworlds
featuring multiple gods, goddesses and monsters meeting up and having battles and having
scandalous sex and so on. The emphasis in storytelling had, over time, shifted from plot to
character to world.
Transmedia narratives take that emphasis on worldbuilding and elevate it to a new level. The
entertainment industry has learned that yes, popular recurring characters can increase repeat
revenue, but better still is a rich storyworld that can host multiple sets of recurring characters,
and thus multiple sub-franchises’ worth of content. For example, Star Trek’s multiple
subfranchises include the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager,
Enterprise, and JJ Abrams’ 2009 reboot – each of which have a TV show or feature film as its
tentpole, but have spun out dozens of transmedia extensions into books, comics and video
games.
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These multiple subfranchises can co-exist, flourish and reinforce one another as the
ongoing story of the Star Trek world flows from television to film to books and comics and back
again. In his text Star Trek: Parallel Negatives, Chris Gregory describes the franchise’s world as
follows:
The complex history of alliances and conflicts between the major players in galactic politics –
the Federation, the Klingons, the Cardassians, the Romulans, the Borg, and the Dominion – now
forms a constantly shifting political backdrop to the action, and often provides motivation for the
stories.
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In the Star Trek franchise, the Klingon characters introduced in the original Star Trek become
allies in Star Trek:The Next Generation, as evidenced by the presence of Lt. Commander Worf
on the bridge of the Enterprise. Tribbles, the tiny fuzzy menaces introduced in a classic episode
of Star Trek (“The Trouble with Tribbles”), reappear to plague Sisko and his crew in Star Trek:

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Don’t forget that the original series’ migration from television to feature films is itself a great case
study in transmedia storytelling.
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Gregory 2000, p. 21.
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Deep Space Nine (“Trials and Tribble-ations”). The villainous Borg that are introduced in The
Next Generation (“Q Who?”) reappear in Star Trek: Voyager, the feature film Star Trek: First
Contact and, in a nifty bit of continuity-massaging, the prequel series Enterprise
(“Regeneration”). One battle with the Borg, the Battle of Wolf 359, becomes a legendary event
in the Star Trek world: it is first introduced in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode (“The
Best of Both Worlds, Part II”), is revisited in the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
(“Emissary”), and is later referenced in Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Family”), the feature
film Star Trek: First Contact, and in Star Trek: Voyager (“Unity”). Outside of television, the
battle is also referenced in Peter David’s Star Trek novel Vendetta and in the video game Star
Trek: Borg.
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All of these events are introduced in individual narratives or episodes with
different protagonists, but they all make valuable contributions to the greater metanarrative of the
Star Trek universe.
However, Star Trek also demonstrates the challenge of what happens when such a vast world
grows too unwieldy. It’s all too easy for a Star Trek audience member to engage with a single
one of these subfranchises, consume everything that subfranchise has to offer, and then leave
without exploring the other subfranchises.
What is needed is a kind of world-centric narrative design that helps audiences become invested
in the world above and beyond any single character, or sets of characters.

Telling the Story of a World
Contrast the Star Trek franchise against the subsets of the Star Wars franchise that are
considered strictly canon: the eleven feature films (to date), the animated Rebels television series,
the animated Clone Wars television series.
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Despite Lucas’ later assertions that the story of Star
Wars is really the rise, fall, and eventual redemption of Anakin Skywalker, most audiences will
assert that the story of Episode I, II, and III tell the story of Anakin Skywalker, while Episode IV,

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wolf_359
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Yes, there have been eleven – the eight core films up through 2017’s The Last Jedi, plus Rogue One,
Solo and the animated Clone Wars feature film released in 2008.
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V, and VI tell the story of Anakin’s son Luke. This is because in A New Hope, The Empire
Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, Anakin Skywalker – now Darth Vader – is a secondary
character. The primary character of these films, the avatar through which the audience
experiences this particular galaxy a long, long time ago and far, far away, is Luke. But, of course,
Luke hasn’t even been born yet in The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, the entirety of
Clone Wars and the majority of Revenge of the Sith. So perhaps the ‘story’ of the entire
"Skywalker saga" isn’t really about Anakin or Luke (again demonstrating the complexity of the
“character storyworld characteristics” I described in part II, chapter 2).
If we consider a story to be about how a series of events change something, then the something
being changed over the course of the Star Wars franchise is the world. (Or, in this case, the
galaxy.) The grand narrative of the Star Wars franchise is too epic to be considered the story of
just one Skywalker, as evidenced by all the Expanded Universe stories that take place centuries
before and after the six feature films. Instead, Star Wars fans return again and again to find out
how the world develops; we do so through recurring characters that serve as our avatars, but
even when a wholly new set of characters are introduced (such as in the Dark Horse comic series
Legacy of the Force, which is set 140 years after the last film) we are still invested in the story of
the world.
This philosophy becomes more tangible in transmedia narratives, especially when each extension
is designed to stand more or less on their own See the chapter on Modularity for more on this.. In the
earlier example of the letter in the Matrix transmedia narrative, Neo only appears in a few of the
components. His appearance in Enter the Matrix is extremely limited, and he doesn’t appear in
any of the short animated films in The Animatrix. If one were to ask what the ‘story’ of The
Matrix would be, the obvious answer would be “the story of Neo as he saves the world,” but on
closer examination this doesn’t bear out. The story of the Matrix films may be the story of Neo,
but the story of the Matrix franchise is the story of the fall of humanity, the rise of the machines,
and their continual conflict. The story of the franchise is the story of the world.
Telling a great story about a world, sometimes across hundreds of extensions, isn’t easy. When
developing a narrative that's meant to extend across multiple media for a decade or more, special
attention must be paid to developing a narrative architecture upon which multiple storylines
(often in different media types and in multiple subfranchises) can flourish while remaining
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connected together via the high-level superstory of the world. This is the careful crafting of what
Daniel Mackay calls ‘imaginary-entertainment environments’: “fictional settings that change
over time as if they were real places and that are published in a variety of mediums… each of
them in communication with the others as they contribute towards the growth, history and status
of the setting”.
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This also drives home the importance of designing storyworlds as rulesets, or as possibility
spaces – and why it's so critically important to invest the time and energy in creating Narrative
Design Documents for such vast storyworlds. Telling one story is relatively straightforward, with
the kinds of skills taught in most creative writing or screenwriting classes. Creating a world as a
platform for multiple stories to unfold across a decade or more requires a mindset more like
creating a guidebook for a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons, outlining
what is and is not possible in that world, and what has and has not happened.
One approach to this is that taught by Alex McDowell, the founder of USC's World Building
Media Lab and World Building Institute, as well as the production designer for such feature
films as Fight Club, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Man of Steel and – most importantly for
our purposes – Minority Report.

Case Study: Minority Report
McDowell introduces his world building methodology by sharing the story of his role as
production designer for Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. In the chapter I coauthored with
McDowell, Laura Cechanowicz, Brian Cantrell, Jeff Watson and Ann Pendleton-Jullian for Mark
J.P. Wolf's Imaginary Worlds Revisited, we retold that story as follows:
When McDowell joined [Minority Report], there was no script in place. Instead,
Spielberg hired both McDowell and head writer Scott Frank on the same day, and
gave them a few starting requirements: one, the film would be loosely based on an
original short story by Philip K. Dick about “precogs” who could predict the

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Mackay 2011, p. 29.
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future; two, that the film would be set in mid-21st century Washington, DC; and
three, that it would be set in a world that was both (apparently) benign and
grounded in research investigations of the emerging technologies, opportunities,
and challenges of the present day. Focusing on that third point, McDowell and his
team set about building the world first, and then seeing what stories emerged.
After an initial think tank organized by the producers, which assembled a network
of domain experts from organizations such as the MIT Media Lab and DARPA,
McDowell and his team began to develop ‘What If, Why Not’ scenarios on a
range of subjects, including Time & Space (urban planning, social systems),
Individual & Environment (wearables, advertising and the consumer), Mobility
(transportation systems), and Data & Technology (intuitive interaction). Out of
this process emerged multiple interconnected categories, or ecologies – politics,
infrastructure, culture, and energy – which each contained multiple sub-categories.
By mapping out these categories, how they interconnect and where they overlap,
the team began to develop a narrative design model similar to a mandala, a
geometric representation of the universe found in several Eastern religions. This
model helped the team envision the impact their initial “What If” would have
across multiple aspects of their fictional storyworld.
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"Any world is an interlocking system, driven by a rigorous methodology and
logic," McDowell says. "We look at all the possible societal, technological,
economic, environmental, and political influences on the world. As a result,
multiple stories - provocative, inviting and immersive - grow organically out of
the world."
For Minority Report, the initial "What if?" were the precogs from the Philip K.
Dick story. Their existence led the team to ask, “What if the prediction and
consequent prevention of violent crime and murder caused a vast population to
stream into the protective umbrella of the precogs in DC?”
That “What if?” was followed by a series of “Then what?” questions. The first
"then what?" asked, "What impact would this have on the city?" Knowing that no
buildings can be constructed on the Washington, D.C. side of the Potomac that are
taller than the Capitol Building, the team posited an explosion of super-
skyscrapers across the river in Rosslyn and Arlington. The next “Then what?”
asked, “What impact would that super-density and super-verticality have on
transportation?” If these skyscrapers were hundreds of stories tall, then it might
take longer to get from the upper stories to the surface than it might to take the
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Metro from the foot of the building to one's offices downtown – and parking
would be an absolute nightmare! This led the team to imagine personal
autonomous vehicles that could zip through the streets and then, doing a vertical
90-degree pivot, race up and down the sides of the buildings. Each apartment
would therefore feature a "garage door" on its side for the vehicles to slip inside
and transform to furniture. From an action-adventure film director's point of view,
this provided the opportunity for the film's star, Tom Cruise, to engage in a high-
speed vertical car chase, a sequence that would not have emerged from a
conventional script-writing process.
Spielberg, however, deftly used this “apparently benign future” world building to
lull the audience into a sense of utopic false security about a murder-free society.
This let Spielberg pull the rug out from under the audience when the film posed a
much darker “What if?” question: “Would you still want to live in a murder-free
society at the cost of all your civil liberties?” That disturbing, provocative
question became the narrative backbone that ripples through Minority Report like
the CNC-milled interior surface of the Precog Chamber.
This world building process also had a secondary, incredibly powerful effect.
McDowell and his team built out their fictional storyworld through extensive
research conducted in collaboration with multiple domain experts. This broad,
real-world collaborative imagining led to hundreds of ideas of how technology
might differ in such a world – and how those ideas might be actually created and
built for our own world now. Over 100 of the film's imagined technologies,
including the famous gestural interface developed by John Underkoffler, at that
time a recent graduate from the MIT Media Lab (who McDowell hired to be an
in-house scientist advisor for the duration of the production), have been patented.
The unique experience of Minority Report made McDowell realize that such
extensive, research-driven world building exercises can not only create more
robust imaginary worlds, but lead to massive innovations and benefits in the real
world as well. It is this methodology – a series of ‘What If, Why Not, Then What,
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So What’ questions across multiple domains with a human lens always firmly at
the center – that the Wbi and WbML use in all of their classes and projects.
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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as Worldbuilding Tool
In my worldbuilding work, I prefer a modified version of McDowell's methodology. McDowell's
"What if? Then what? Then what? So what?" is brilliant, but I personally need a better sense of
structure. As such, I developed a way to use Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as a worldbuilding
tool.
In 1943, Brooklyn College psychology professor Abraham Maslow published his paper "A
Theory of Human Motivation" in Psychological Review. In it, he created a pyramid-style model
of human needs as tiers of motivation. At the bottom tier are the most basic needs, consisting of
physiological needs (food, water, warmth, rest) and basic safety needs (security, safety). Above
that is a tier of psychological needs consisting of belongingness and love needs (intimate
relationships, friends) and esteem needs (prestige and feeling of accomplishment). At the
pinnacle is a tier of self-actualization needs, which are the human need to achieve their full
potential, including creative activities.

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Cechanowicz et al 2016, pp 201-203.
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To determine if you're telling a story or building a world, identify your central deviation from
reality – your "What if?" question in McDowell's model. Then figure out how far down the
model that deviation impacts the storyworld as a whole. A romantic comedy like When Harry
Met Sally isn't going to have much impact on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs,
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which makes
sense as When Harry Met Sally isn't much of a worldbuild. Their 1980s New York pretty much
is the 1980s New York, if a bit funnier and wackier.
Contrast this against a deeper worldbuild like Minority Report. As described in the preceding
section, "What if you could predict the future within a limited time and a limited space?" has
profound impact on, if not how that world satisfies its physiological needs, then absolutely its
safety needs. How the precogs revolutionize crime prevention, including how it could go wrong,
is the narrative backbone of that film. However, as McDowell pointed out, the bang-on effects of
that "What if?" have a much wider-ranging impact beyond just crime prevention. As described
earlier, there is only one set of precogs in that world and they're installed in Washington, DC,
then the population influx into that city would explode, which would necessitate a radical
reinvention of housing and transportation. What first seems like a "What if?" that starts at the

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https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
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No, "I'll have what she's having" doesn't count.
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Safety Needs level actually does radically impact the Physiological Needs level, and much of the
rest of the pyramid besides.
Truly robust worldbuilds may include numerous "What if" questions operating in concert with
one another. James Cameron's world of Pandora from Avatar has at least three major central
"What if?" questions ("What if we could use technology to remotely pilot an alien organism?"
"What if we had a much more direct connection to nature?" "How far would we go to obtain a
insanely valuable element – even on another world?") but the actual worldbuild for Avatar
extends far beyond those questions into nearly every element of Pandora's ecosystem. This
extensive worldbuilding, on display in James Cameron's Avatar: An Activist's Survival Guide
which is itself a modified version of the story bible Cameron created for the production, gets into
the flora, fauna, mineral and linguistic systems of that world. In each case a worldbuilder could
have imagined a central tenet of how Pandora differed from Earth and then run it up Maslow's
pyramid to see how that deviation impacted every aspect of the planet's ecosystem, its
inhabitants and its invaders.

Sidebar: Fragmentation
In A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, Andrea Phillips describes “telling a story
transmedia-style” as “either you take a single story and you splinter it across multiple media, or
you start with one story and you keep adding pieces on to it ad infinitum.” Either approach “will
result in projects that can be described with phrases like ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ and ‘a
single cohesive story.’” As Philips observes, however, both processes have the same end result:
fragmentation, albeit at different scales:
Star Wars uses a story that’s been broken into really big fragments (a whole film,
a book), and Pandemic uses much smaller ones (a single bottle of water, a series
of tweets). And then there are a number of hybrid projects that mix big and little
pieces together, like Cathy’s Book, which used a single-medium narrative piece (a
book), but combined it with fragments of evidence and online components to tell
a deeper story.
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No matter how big the pieces are, though, you interact with them using the same
basic behavior. Compare this with different kinds of jigsaw puzzles. There are
five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles out there, and if you pick up only one piece,
you can’t guess whether the whole thing will be a mountaintop or a potted plant.
There are also simpler puzzles where each piece looks like an entire horse or cow
or sheep, but as with more complex puzzles, you still have to finish the puzzle to
see the whole farm.
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Philips argues that as you break a story into greater numbers of pieces, the likelihood increases
that you’re going to be using a more East Coast style, “entering a highly distributed structure and
embedding pieces of story into the real world” and “using interactive elements and real-time
platforms.” As Philips writes,
This is what makes for sexy, award-winning campaigns and deep, immersive
experiences. […] This is where you find writing-as-performance-art. It’s where
you find audience-as-agent. This is the thing that gets me excited about the power
of transmedia [and] – to get back to the business of creation – it’s also a more
educational subject to study, if you’re at all interested in transmedia storytelling,
because the tricks and tools of single-medium storytelling won’t serve you very
well. Big-business transmedia narratives using tentpole feature films, AAA video
games, and books from the Big Six publishing firms can be integrated into unified
story universes without shifting into a completely transmedia mindset. But if you
learn how to create a highly fragmented narrative, that knowledge will serve you
no matter where on the spectrum you land.
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I agree with Phillips’ premises, but I come down on the other side of her conclusion. Yes,
transmedia storytelling does require some degree of fragmentation, and I agree that the more
granular those fragments are, the more likely it is that you’re creating something that feels more
like an alternate reality game than a big Star Wars style franchise.

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Phillips 2012.
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Phillips 2012.
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However, I strongly disagree with Phillips’ assertion that East Coast style is “a more educational
subject to study”, because I believe that building West Coast-style transmedia experiences is
about much more than just “the tricks and tools of single-medium storytelling.” Truly well-done
West Coast-style transmedia experiences are (as the rest of this book will demonstrate) much
more about carefully crafting the meta-experience of how the pieces fit together – and therefore a
great deal of attention must be paid to how those pieces are broken apart. It’s not just that the
story is fragmented, it’s how the story is fragmented that’s important.
This is where I also take issue with Phillips’ oversimplification that a storyteller either breaks
apart a single story, or they take a story and “keep adding pieces on to it ad infinitum”. The truth,
I believe, is somewhere in the middle: a truly artfully-crafted transmedia story franchise will be
designed in such a way that it supports deliberate additions both to the beginning, to the end, and
within the timeline of the story, and supports clear experience pathways to be drawn between
those additions.
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At some level it is a kind of puzzle, absolutely – but in at least three
dimensions. The pieces don’t just fit together on a 2-D plane – whole other pieces can be
connected by stacking up on top of the puzzle or drilling down beneath the puzzle, and
sometimes those additional pieces make the pieces on the 2-D plane fit together much better. Of
course, to craft a 3-D puzzle like this, the puzzlemaker has to spend a lot more time thinking
about how the pieces fit together, as opposed to just slicing a picture apart willy-nilly. This is
why I argue that a transmedia storyteller must create extensible narrative architectures,
extensible characters and extensible locations and objects – it’s not just that they are strategically
disassembled and reassembled, but each part is designed to be added onto, sometimes for
decades, to create nearly infinitely-expandable storyworlds and experiences.

Maps as Worldbuilding Tools
While I was studying at MIT, the Comparative Media Studies program brought in famed graphic
novelist and character designer Frank Espinosa to teach a worldbuilding class. It was, predictably
enough, one of the most amazing classes I've ever taken. In a semester of awesomeness, one of

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More on this in the next chapter.
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the greatest lessons Frank shared with us was his thinking about how to use maps as
worldbuilding tools.
Espinosa stood at the whiteboard and made a few squiggly lines. He then pointed at them and
declared these were landmasses, and the area between them was water. Based on how close two
particular areas were to each other, he suggested that this would be a really good place for a
culture to construct an artificial gateway and charge ridiculous fees to permit sailors passage. He
drew some more squiggly lines on the board, and presto – there was the enormous gateway.
However, Espinosa continued, this would really irritate some folks, who might then go
searching for alternate ways to get around that particular gateway, which would then lead to the
discovery of a new set of islands further down the cape. Squiggle squiggle squiggle. One of these
islands, Espinosa posited, might actually be a volcano – and the culture that lived there might
have access to a unique mineral that could be honed into amazing weapons… Squiggle squiggle
squiggle.
Before our eyes, Espinosa began to build a world, using little more than a few squiggly lines and
some basic understanding of geography, culture, politics, and so on.
A similar approach, albeit a much more high-def version, can be seen in the opening credits of
Game of Thrones. As the camera sweeps across the different parts of Westeros, we get a glimpse
of the geography of the land and, more importantly, how the people there adapted to it. We see
the Wall and the wintry weather around it, its proximity to the Starks' stronghold of Winterfell,
the Iron Islands and the seafaring culture of the Grayjoys, and so on and so on. Multiple types of
terrain give rise to multiple cultures as well as numerous conflicts and alliances between them.
One last thing: when Espinosa was almost done with his sketch of a map, he turned to an empty
part and, with a flourish, he scribbled in four words: Here there be dragons. Here, Espinosa
announced, was a mystery. No one had explored that part of the map yet, and those who had tried
never returned. Immediately all of our curiosities were piqued. It's my favorite part of any
antique map, the bits illustrated with ornate monsters and those four little words. In those spots
there be dragons, and also great opportunities for stories.
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More on this in #8, Multiple Experience Pathways and Modularity.
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The moral of this story? Sometimes a fantastic way to start building a world is by drawing a few
squiggly lines.

Case Study: The Lord of the Rings
There are, of course, myriad other ways a storyworld can evolve. Mark J.P. Wolf describes the
origin of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Arda (of which Middle-Earth is a part) as follows:
Tolkien had always been interested in languages and had even made up his own
imaginary languages as a child. He studied philology at Oxford University, and
continued devising his own languages, influenced by the sound and structure of
languages he was studying, including Finnish, Latin, Welsh, Icelandic, and other
old Nordic and Scandinavian languages. Realizing that languages do not evolve in
a vacuum, he decided to create the cultures from which his languages would come.
While convalescing from trench fever in 1917, after serving in World War I, he
began writing “The Fall of Gondolin,” the story of Beren and Lúthien, and other
connected tales that grew into his legendarium of the world he called Arda, which
he called the “Silmarillion” (a version of which was edited and published by his
son Christopher as The Silmarillion in 1977). Tolkien’s children’s story, The
Hobbit (1937), was originally separate from his mythology but gradually became
connected to it, and was later revised to be more consistent with his other works.
Following the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien tried to get his Silmarillion
mythology published, but it was turned down; the publishers wanted something
with more hobbits in it instead. Therefore, Tolkien began writing a sequel, which
would eventually become The Lord of the Rings.
…While much of what Tolkien did, in terms of world-building, had already been
done by others – a pantheon of gods, maps, timelines, glossaries, calendars,
invented languages, and alphabets – it was the degree to which he did them that
gave his world its rich verisimilitude, and the quality of his work, with
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meaningful details integrated into an elaborate backstory, that set a new standard
for world-building.
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Wolf then cites Humphrey Carpenter, who writes:
Not content with writing a large and complex book, [Tolkien] felt he must ensure
that every single detail fitted satisfactorily into the total pattern. Geography,
chronology, and nomenclature all had to be entirely consistent. He had been given
some assistance with the geography, for his son Christopher helped him by
drawing an elaborate map of the terrain covered by the story. … But the map in
itself was not enough, and he made endless calculations of time and distance,
drawing up elaborate charts concerning events in the story, showing dates, the
days of the week, the hours, and sometimes even the direction of the wind and the
phase of the moon. This was partly his habitual insistence on perfection, partly
sheer revealing in the fun of “subcreation”, but most of all a concern to provide a
totally convincing picture.
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Placing a Human Lens at the Center
To really kick the tires of a storyworld, you need to see it through the eyes of its inhabitants. In
Alex McDowell's worldbuilding course at USC, he has his students first come together to draw
up a basic set of parameters for an imaginary world, and then each student must create a
character of their own to run through that world.
For example, in 2015 and 2016 McDowell’s students (myself included) imagined a 2035 for
Lagos, Nigeria in which drinkable water was privatized. Here’s how we described it in the
chapter I co-authored with McDowell, Laura Cechanowicz, Brian Cantrell, Jeff Watson, and Ann
Pendleton-Jullian for Mark J. P. Wolf’s Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: Form & Structure in
World Design:

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Wolf 2012, pp. 130-131.
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Carpenter 1977, pp. 194-195.
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Set in Lagos, Nigeria in the mid-2030s, Dry City imagines a future in which water
has been privatized, commodified, and transformed into currency in the wake of
global economic disaster. The World Building class’ heterogenous group of
students – architects, interactive media designers, musicians, engineers, urban
planners, animators, filmmakers and artists, under the guidance of McDowell and
his teaching assistants Brandon Cahoon and Laura Cechanowicz – chose to focus
on Lagos due to its rapid urbanization, booming economy, and growing
population, and chose to introduce water commodification and scarcity under the
speculation that such disruptors would intensify social inequity, generate conflicts,
and require aggressive adaptation across social boundaries, even within the upper
classes.
Both the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 classes were highly influenced by Kunlé
Adeyemi’s Makoko Floating School, a prototype floating structure designed to
“generate a sustainable, ecological, alternative building system and urban water
culture for the teeming population of Africa’s coastal regions”, and Adeyemi
served as an expert interviewee informing the development of the project. In the
second semester the school took a true center stage through one character and his
influence on education, community, entrepreneurship and leadership. The
research throughout both semesters grounded this fictional future world build
within the reality of Lagos, and students conducted extensive research not only
through texts, videos, and articles but also through firsthand interviews with guest
speakers from Nigeria and remote interviews with experts in various fields and
from Lagos and Makoko proper.
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The fall 2015 semester did the foundational world-build, sketching out the rules of this future
Lagos through an intense period of collaborative research, interviews with subject matter experts,
and a great deal of storytelling and sketching. The primary deviation from reality, that drinkable
water had been privatized, had a massive bang-on effect across the entire rest of the ecosystem –
including drinkable water then becoming the backbone of “an economic system built on a water-
based currency”:

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Cechanowicz et al 2016, p. 211.
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It was in this initial stage that most of the primary “top-level” mandala categories
for the world—time period, global economics, ecology, geography, disruptors,
and so on—were chosen. The students elected to focus on the domains of energy,
politics, infrastructure, and culture, with subdomains such as media,
virtual/augmented reality, body, food, education, desalination, synthetic biology,
smart materials, informal urbanism, and water economics.
…A period of intense research generated a plausible, alternate reality in which the
conflicts and their resolutions implied by this future could be modeled. Much of
the build at this phase centered around considerations such as the potential
characteristics of a water-based economy, its broader cultural effects, and how the
extraction of reusable elements from e-waste might be mobilized for the creation
of smart materials (all separate narrative facets of the world). Soon a theme of
technology intertwined with identity and accountability began to emerge through
the development of multiple intertwined narratives.
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Again, however, the only way to really test the viability of the world you’re creating is to place a
human lens at the center – in other words, to imagine what it would be like to actually live in this
world. Each student was assigned the task of creating a character in this world, and then running
them through a day in their lives. Hour by hour, task by task, the students began to explore how
the central deviation from reality impacted things as mundane as where their characters lived,
how they ate breakfast, how they got to work in the morning, what they did for a living, how
they went shopping, and so on.
Many of the characters developed as lenses into these various dimensions were
designed to operate in one way or another at relatively rarefied or professional
levels of technological culture. These characters/lenses included an economist, a
fashion designer, and a microbiologist among other upper-class professions, and
through their various subjective viewpoints the team was able to bring into focus
how broad technological and economic aspects of the world might affect the

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Ibid.
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individuals who inhabit it—including characters who would not plausibly inhabit
the same social milieus as those used for narrative insight. For example, the
collection and recycling of e-waste by the hired poor working in tandem with
automated systems in this world raised questions around cottage industries,
ecological contamination, automation, drone usage, and recycling and reuse more
broadly.
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The second semester, when I took the course, we narrowed our focus to the floating fishing
village of Makoko. Makoko is a real-world place, constructed by subsistence-level fishermen and
their families out of salvaged materials on a foundation of sunken garbage in the Lagos Lagoon.
In the real world, the Lagosian government has tried multiple times to eradicate this community.
In our imagined future of Lagos, their resourcefulness (as they would have already had to figure
out how to purify drinkable water out of the highly polluted waters of the lagoon or rainwater)
would place Makoko at the forefront of a new wave of sustainable living, even as that same
resourcefulness would only heighten tensions with the government and corporations who might
view such water purification as essentially counterfeiting.
While the first semester was heavily based around the “What If?” of the
commodification of water, in the second semester the primary constraints of the
world were allowed to be slowly revealed and determined by the team. In this
way, the potential of the origin story and rules of the world were investigated
through the world building process.
An initial deep research dive exploring the possible ecological state of 2035,
including a potential rise in sea-level, revealed that Makoko would perhaps be
better equipped than inhabitants of the mainland to adapt to this state of affairs.
(As Media Arts and Practices PhD student and WbML Creative Director Geoffrey
Long wrote, Makoko was “primed to thrive” after “the water levels have leapt up
to devour the poor landlocked souls who never taught their houses to swim.”)
Additionally, the economic and political tensions that currently exist between
Makoko and Lagos provided a rich opportunity for exploring how this

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Cechanowicz et al 2016, p. 212.
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impoverished community might reinvent itself in the coming years, as it has been
forced to do many times since its creation in the 18th century.
Throughout the semester, the class worked hard to ensure that a human lens was
kept at the center of their work. At every stage, each student shared his or her
research into the current state of Makoko and its relationship to Lagos with the
team as a whole, while also collectively mapping and identifying specific aspects
of the research to situate it in relation to the individual, the community, the world,
or to multiple scales. Research was conducted through literature, expert
interviews, and media reviews and analyses. After having built a relatively solid
ethnographic understanding of the Makoko of 2016, this actual community was
put into conversation with our future, self-sufficient Makoko in terms of Internet,
water, and power. This research revealed a number of aspects of this insular
community that were highly promising for future speculation (e.g. the process
they have created for terraforming the shallow lagoon, their access to cellphones,
their aptitude for repurposing technology, and the social networks they have
formed for recycling raw material). The team decided to explore the narrative
potential of these various dimensions, adding the premise that, by 2036, Makoko
has been cut off from the power grid and Internet by the government of Lagos, but
that it has not been destroyed due to its self-sufficient nature and growing
awareness and support from the world community.
Each student developed a character within this world, and engaged in various
speculative fiction exercises to imagine what their character’s life would be like in
2036, while remaining attentive to each character’s demands on the world space
as well as the influence of the different scales of the world on each character.
Working from the everyday individual scale, participants imagined everything
from the contents of a character’s purse, to their daily routine from hour to hour.
This bottom-up speculation enriched the students’ understanding of the larger
world of Makoko, Lagos, and the world in 2036. Research has since continued to
oscillate between examination of the larger ‘ecologies’ of Makoko to that of the
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reciprocal effects of each character on Makoko and of Makoko on each
character.
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We not only plotted out our characters’ actions hour by hour, we also made a map of where that
day would take them. This helped us figure out where and how our characters might interact with
one another. For example, my character was an afrofuturist graphic novelist whose stories
inspired these 2035 Makokoans to imagine what their lives might be like in 2045, 2055, or 2065
– and how to start laying the groundwork for that future. As such, he’s considered a visionary in
cultures around the world, but a dangerous revolutionary by the Lagosian government. As part of
this personal mission he teaches comics-making courses to young Makokoans in a school run by
the character created by my friend and fellow grad student Brian Cantrell.
McDowell’s approach to placing the human lens at the center, and then creating multiple human
lenses to provide multiple windows into exploring that world, is ideal for a future of storytelling
that features vast storyworlds with a vast number of characters whose stories interconnect. This
approach can be considered rhizomatic, after Deleuze and Guattari; insofar as a rhizome is a
network of interconnected nodes, so too is a storyworld a network of interconnected elements in
a much more organic model, as reflected in Alex McDowell’s model of overlapping systems in
his worldbuilding methodology:

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Cechanowicz et al 2016, p. 214-216.
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Having characters and stories serve as ‘tour guides’ through these fictional storyworlds makes all
the difference between a cold, sterile simulation or model and an engaging human story.
The other crucial rhizomatic element – and the primary difference between a story and a
storyworld – is that a truly successful worldbuild doesn’t support a single human lens, but
multiple human lenses. This is why McDowell has his students create different characters and
runs them through “day in the life” exercises to kick the tires of their collaboratively-created
storyworlds.
I’ve included my final project, Dry City: Turning Points, here as an example. Note the details of
where the protagonist lives, how he grows much of his own food, has to travel to use the global
Internet (as the government has cut off Makoko) and so on. All of these ideas came directly out
of McDowell’s “What if? Then what? Then what?” process, and were then fed back into our
collective imagining of Makoko to spark further ideation.
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Action: Evaluating World-Centric Narrative Design
1. Choose an existing storyworld. What is its "What if?", its central deviation from
reality? List how that "What if?" impacts each tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of
Needs.
2. What are this storyworld's rules? How does the storyworld convey those rules?
How does it convey those rules to its audience? Does it directly and explicitly
state them? How? Does it manifest them and imply them? How?

Action: Creating World-Centric Narrative Design
1. Write up the ‘What if?’ of your storyworld. Describe how this central deviation
from reality impacts each tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Insert into section
2.1 of your NDD.
2. Identify three key rules of your storyworld. How will those rules manifest
themselves in your storyworld, without being stated outright? Insert into section
2.2 of your NDD.
3. Sketch out a map of your storyworld. Identify three key locations and three
mysterious "here there be dragons" spots. Insert map and high-level descriptions
of the places into section 2.3 of your NDD. (It's okay to be vague – detailed
versions will be added to 8.1, 8.2, etc. once you sketch out your story and
determine which settings will be included.)
4. Identify three key events in the history of your storyworld, and identify three key
events that happen during your story. Insert into section 2.4 of your NDD.

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Example: World-Centric Narrative Design in Spookshow
By this point in developing Spookshow, I had an idea as to what kind of world I wanted to build,
as well as the kind of mood I wanted it to evoke in my audience. The challenge now was to find
a sufficient deviation from reality that would support an entire world.
I'd already been struck by this image of a traveling carnival with real magic, similar to that in
Carnevale, and I'd also been haunted (all puns intended) by the imagery of 1920s-1940s stage
magicians. While flipping through big books of poster art from the period, I kept coming across
images of the stage magicians interacting with ghosts, monsters and the devil himself.

Eva Fay was one of the great female stage magicians of the era.
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Given that the period between WWI and WWII was a major golden age for stage magicians,
mystics and mediums, which was directly attributable to the horrors of WWI, I began to look to
the end of the Great War for my "What if?" What if, I wondered, WWI ended with a catastrophic
event more like WWII? What if that event was magical? The Central Powers were made up of
many of the countries where our fairy tales originated – what if those stories turned out to be
true, and the Central Powers somehow managed to leash that magic and use it in the war?
Thus was the central "What if?" for Spookshow born: What if World War I had ended with the
magical equivalent of a nuclear strike against the western United States, reducing it to a Great
Wilderness?
From there, the world started to grow. If such a "Great Disaster" actually happened, then the
fallout would have been world-changing. The United States would have suddenly found itself
drastically weakened, with all of its work colonizing the land West of the Mississippi undone
overnight. This would have a dramatic impact on everything, all the way down to the most basic
elements on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The loss of cattle ranching territory would upend
America's food system and its place in the global economy.
Further, the sudden realization that magic was real would cause a tectonic shift in how
Americans, and the rest of the world, thought about their safety. In Dark Ages like this where
fear runs rampant, corrupt organizations exploit that fear to consolidate their power – and none
are more horrific than corrupt religious organizations and corporations. Suddenly, I not only had
an idea as to how my world might be radically different, given the political climate in America
after the 2016 election I also had a pretty strong idea as to who my (all too timely) villains would
be. I imagined that all the organized religions in the world would recognize the threat posed by
real magic, and would band together into one Church to fight it. Greedy corporate types,
recognizing the shift in power away from radically weakened governments towards the Church,
would throw their support behind the Church. It wouldn't be long before this Church became the
world's leading superpower.
I began to sketch out the rules of my world, using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The following
is what I began to enter into my Narrative Design Document as I worked my way up the pyramid.

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Biological/Physiological (Basic Survival Needs)
Food
Much as in the real Great Depression, food in Spookshow is a challenge. The Great Disaster
transformed countless acres of prime farmland into deep forest, and efforts to resettle the land
have been mixed at best. Stranger still, it also magically transformed the arid areas of the
American southwest into deep forest as well, making cattle ranching nearly impossible. As a
result, farmland east of the Mississippi is now at a premium, and families may raise food that
they can’t afford to eat themselves, subsisting instead on a diet that consists mostly of potatoes,
beans and vegetables.
Water
Water in this world is much the same as in the real Great Depression, but the Disaster changed
the “dustbowl” aspect into something closer to “European black forest survival”. Another major
difference is more cultural than biological – running water’s legendary properties as a shield
against the supernatural are amplified by the Disaster stopping at the Mississippi River. (More on
this below.) Water witches with their dowsing rods still exist, but practice their nature magic in
deep secret for fear they’ll be killed by the Inquisition.
Transport
Transportation in this world is also much the same as in our own, but trains and planes now stop
at the Mississippi. The train tracks were destroyed when the forests erupted from the ground, and
early planes sent to do reconnaissance over the Wilderness were snatched from the sky by
enormous, monstrous things. Riverboats going up and down the Mississippi are effectively
border patrols, and carry heavily armed guards to defend themselves against river monsters and
other dangers. Vehicles nearly all include medallions of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of
travel, to protect travelers on even mundane voyages, and those vehicles that must venture into
the Wilderness are highly armored and covered with anti-magic wards from the Church for
protection. Many travelers that need to go into the Wilderness elect to use horses and carriages,
as magic is said to interfere with mechanical vehicles.
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Where things have advanced is where technomancers have secretly gone to work for industrial
companies, resulting in erratic leaps forward in technological advancement. This results in some
fantastic steam-powered or clockwork creations, although the Church watches over these with a
deeply skeptical eye. The Church has been known to look the other way when some
advancement is so remarkable that it increases the quality of all lives, but the Inquisitors have
been known to show up at certain factories and demand to see proof of non-magical
manufacturing.
Reproduction
Sex is pretty much the same, but babies are now given tests for their potential as magic-users at
childbirth. These tests are administered by the Church, and they refuse to share how they work.
As a result, the Church whisks away some newborn children, many before their parents even get
a chance to hold them.
Safety (Conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature)
Shelter
Homes in this world bear wards on their doors and windows, as prescribed and administered by
the Church (for a small fee, of course) to keep magic out. The most valuable plots of land in the
country are architected in such a way that they sit at the crook of a split in a river, effectively
creating a “moat” of running water around the property, as it is believed that running water is a
surefire protection against magic and the supernatural. Much like the real Great Depression,
there is a huge number of unemployed and homeless people down on their luck, drifting from
town to town with only the clothes on their backs; the most fortunate of these have a tent, or at
least a bedroll. Some of these folks have wards they hang from their tent flaps to keep the magic
away. Others, however, view the Church’s refusal to rescue them from this misery as a betrayal,
and practice secret rituals (usually unsuccessfully) in the dead of night in swamps and other
secret places. Colonies being built in the Great Wilderness tend to be built in places where rivers
can be diverted in such ways, in nearly castle-like arrangements – a group of small, tightly-
clustered buildings inside a wall surrounded by a moat – for protection against monstrous
creatures and possible magicians.
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Clothing
Clothing in Spookshow is an amalgam of 1920s styles, complete with knickers and braces, floral
dresses, pantaloons, spats, and so on. Many folks have wards against magic integrated into their
jewelry, or sometimes woven into their clothing. As with the wards on vehicles and houses, their
effectiveness is highly dubious at best. Their lucrativeness to the Church that sells them, however,
is not.
Offense
In both offense and defense, this is a world bewildered by fear. Legends are mixed up and
confused, resulting in people resorting to a bizarre combination of tactics for both offense and
defense. Wooden stakes, garlic, silver bullets – all are being sold by the Church and shameless
hucksters as weapons against magic and monsters. Some of them do certainly work – a stake
through the heart is pretty certain to kill just about anyone – but, as with the wards, what has
power and what does not is anyone’s guess.
Defense
See above. Wards are worn on the person, through clothing or jewelry or tattoos, and certain
wards are said to be effective against certain types of magic. Running water is believed to be
effective at protecting homes, as are wards etched into the building itself. Other forms of defense
are more practical – some homeowners erect ten-foot walls around their homes, patch up their
windows with concrete and bar their doors.
Love/Belonging (from Conflict comes Community)
Religion/Beliefs
Obviously, religion is a massive area of change here. The Church has won the world in
Spookshow, and will do anything to keep that power. Here’s where things get weird: the Church
is called that because it’s not just the Catholic church. In a fashion similar to the ending of Alan
Moore’s Watchmen, the revelation of true magic and monsters caused a massive banding
together of religious groups into one massive Church, to fight as a unified front against magic-
users. Religions that could be comparatively easily aligned – Catholicism, Protestantism, even
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Judaism – were the first to join forces, followed by other, more disparate religions like Islam
under an explicit agreement that they would be separate but equal partners. In this way, the
Church is effectively a religious United Nations that has taken over the world. To be a
citizen is to worship at the Church, and pledge to fight the forces of magic. Not to do so is to risk
the wrath of the Church’s Inquisitors, which are even more terrifying than they were in the late
1400s.
Community
Communities in Spookshow are very tightly-knit, and fear outsiders. This goes not only for
travelers like Shade and his band, but also for people who prefer to keep to themselves, like the
Smiths.
Family
Families in Spookshow are much like our own contemporary families, with the exception that
multiple generations are more likely to band together under one roof for protection and survival.
Families grow as much of their own food as possible, and children are put to work as early as
possible to pull their own weight and support the elders. The elderly are treated with respect as
masters, and are expected to train the younger generations in their crafts.
Government
As noted above, the Church is now the de facto leader of the world. The United States was set
back nearly a hundred and fifty years by the Disaster, instantly losing all settlements and
resources west of the Mississippi – in other words, much of what made America a dominant
world power. Separation of Church and State has been eliminated, and the President of the
United States now rules beside a Cardinal of the Church.
Esteem (Social Grouping gives rise to Ordering)
Social Classes
The gulf between the haves and the have-nots in this world is huge. One might think that the
ascension of the Church might result in such a gap being collapsed as the Church had more
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resources to give to the poor, but one would be sadly mistaken. Instead, the leaders of the Church
are now wealthy beyond imagination, as are their Inquisitors.
Economics
Victims of an Inquisition found guilty of being magic users have their property seized by the
Church, who tithe a tenth of it back to the State and keep 90% for themselves. As result, the 1%
of industrialists also pass themselves off as the most pious. This causes some extreme tensions
when some of those same industrialists secretly employ technomancers for an edge against their
competition.
Government Tiers
At a local level, each community is overseen by a council and a Mayor, as well as a Head Priest
who reports back up to the Church. The police are augmented by a group of local Inquisitors,
who have super legal powers when it comes to suspected magic-users. Witch hunts are common.
Arts + Cultures (how different groups design w/ different aesthetics)
Visual Arts
The popular visual arts have become dominated by religious imagery, with a strong underground
movement of art exploring magic, monsters, and death. The multiculturalism of the Church –
ironically – translates into a robust mix of cultures in the artwork as well. The different
subcultures in the magic-users community also have their own aesthetics, although in many ways
these are less separate cultures than they are professions within global cultures. Necromancers
may all use a similar set of runes and motifs, for example, but how those runes and motifs are
implemented in a Latin American necromancer will be radically different from a Germanic
necromancer.
Language and Literature
See above. The most notable works of language and literature in this world are the Book of the
Church, which is similar to a Unitarian Bible – it’s an amalgam of all world religions, coupled
together with an updated Malleus Maleficarum, the “Hammer of the Witches” used by witch-
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hunters in the 1400s through the 1600s. The magicians have their own grimoires, of course,
including one particular grimoire which was used to cast the spell that caused the Disaster.
Music
See above. There’s a lot of gospel music in this world, but also a lot of eerie gypsy-style music
among the magic users.
Gameplay
See above. Children play Inquisitors and Magicians in playgrounds, with pretend outcomes as
brutal and horrific as you’d expect.
Self-Actualization (Desire to Optimize Self)
Mastery
For normal folks, ideal life in this storyworld is one of hard work, determination, piety and
obedience. The most one can aspire to is to become an upstanding citizen and member of their
community, mastering whatever craft they choose, and to remain ever vigilant for signs of
encroaching evil, monsters or magic. The intrepid go off to support the recolonization efforts in
the Great Wilderness, or to serve alongside the Inquisitors in defending what remains of America
along the eastern banks of the Mississippi.
Dominance
Dominating oneself through self-discipline is a key element in this storyworld’s dominant
philosophy, which is deeply Puritanical. Dominating others is something the power-hungry seek
to do through ascension in the Church or becoming an Inquisitor (a very well-paid position, by
the by). Nations do not seek to dominate each other because they are all joined under the power
of the Church, and are remaining ever-vigilant against the return of magic and monsters and
dedicated to reclaiming the Great Wilderness despite most efforts to do so failing spectacularly.
This Pax Ecclesia is, of course, shaky, which is one reason the Church is constantly trumpeting
the ever-present danger of magic.
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I then began thinking through the rules of my storyworld. I decided that I wanted magic in my
world to fall into one of several classes, and those who practiced it would thus be classified into
one of four corresponding groups. That led me to develop the following in my NDD.
Rules
For all practical intents and purposes, the default state of physics and general reality in this world
are almost identical to our own. Days have the same number of hours, months have the same
number of days, years have the same number of months. Magicians are humans that are born
with special powers that seem to be, for the most part, hereditary with a few naturally-occurring
spontaneous emergences (see Magic below). As such, magicians need to eat and sleep just like
the rest of us. Magic helps bend, and occasionally break, those laws of physics and reality, but
within limits. A skilled biomancer might be able to animate a regular tree like a Whomping
Willow to defend herself, but transforming an entire forest into a walking army of Ents is more
than even the most legendary biomancer could handle.
Technology
Technology in Spookshow is much the same as in our own world circa 1928, but amped up
through a decade’s worth of Technomancy, resulting in a distinct steampunk vibe in some
respects. Technology that is powered by Technomancy need not obey the rules of physics – cars
run faster, objects that should be too heavy to fly remain aloft with ease, and mechanical toys
come to life with a degree of artificial intelligence. There’s a fine distinction to be made here:
engineers have studied technomancers’ works and made breakthroughs of their own, which
means that incredibly complex clockwork automatons and similar devices are now not
uncommon. This provides spookshows with a degree of plausible deniability should an Inquisitor
come calling – they simply need to demonstrate that what might seem magical is only ornate
mechanics. This means that technomancers frequently forge creations that can “degrade
gracefully” into plausible contraptions.
Where things get weird is when technomancers team up with biomancers and necromancers.
Combining Technomancy with Biomancy results in cyborg extensions being grafted onto living
creatures. Combining Technomancy with Necromancy results in haunted objects, essentially
robots that are being possessed and driven by ghosts. These need not be human, either in
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appearance or soul type – a mechanical bird haunted by the ghost of a bird is totally fair game,
although a technomancer can weave a semblance of life into a mechanical bird without a
necromancer’s assistance.
Magic
Continuing this line of reasoning, magic in Spookshow is ancient and can be complicated – but as
we begin, we’ll keep things simple.
At its most basic, magic is tied to nature. All magicians can thus wield Nature Magic, exerting
some control over water, earth, wind and fire. Their strength may vary, but even beginner
wizards can conjure up flames to light dark passages, gusts of wind to move small objects, and
so on.
Beyond that, every magician has a natural orientation and skill in one of three key areas:
Biomancy, Necromancy or Technomancy. Each of these three areas is connected to a different
aspect of life, or spirit. In the same way that Biomancy and Necromancy are opposites on a
spectrum between life and death, there is a secret fourth area of magic, Cryptomancy, that lies on
the opposite end of the spectrum between human technology or craft and utterly alien wilderness
– in this storyworld, the world of Faerie.
Biomancy
Biomancy is the type of magic directly aligned with the living. Biomancers are often mistakenly
called ‘nature mages’, because they can communicate with – and in some rare cases directly
control – animals and plants. Darker biomancers can use their powers to mind control people. A
biomancer can heal, using their powers to direct the life energy of a patient to mend all but the
most grievous wounds, but they cannot resurrect the dead.
Necromancy
Necromancy is the type of magic directly aligned with the dead. Necromancers can summon
ghosts, raise zombies, animate and control dead matter, and so on. The most benevolent
necromancers conduct séances to provide closure for the grieving; the most corrupt use their
powers to torment their enemies long after they’ve passed. However, their powers are also
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limited; like biomancers, necromancers cannot resurrect the dead; the zombies they raise are
shambling, spiritless creatures. Even if a necromancer were to summon the spirit of the dead and
reanimate the spirit’s corpse, they still could not rejoin the two.
Technomancy
Technomancy is the newest of the three areas, but it is still ancient. Technomancy is the type of
magic that infuses non-living things like clockworks, engineering and so on with a type of life. A
technomancer can not only craft a lifelike automaton, they can weave the threads of life into it to
make it come alive. A technomancer might build a mechanical sparrow and then weave a
birdlike essence into it to effectively create a living clockwork bird. The greatest artists in history
are suspected to be technomancers, as they weave some semblance of life into paintings, music,
even architecture. The most benevolent technomancers invent wondrous toys, and the most evil
create horrific living weapons. Technomancers cannot, however, bind an actual living person’s
spirit to a mechanical creation.
Cryptomancy
Cryptomancy is literally ‘hidden magic,’ a secret form of otherworldly magic that various
magicians in history have encountered fleetingly but have struggled to comprehend. This is
because it is a form of wild magic that belongs not to Earth but to the otherworldly realm of
Faerie. It is a kind of unchained, chaotic magic that may initially seem uncontrollable but is, in
fact, easily wielded by those of Faerie. The spell that caused the Great Disaster is, in fact, the
most extraordinarily powerful Cryptomantic spell known to mankind, and the transformation of
the American West into the Great Wilderness was the result of punching a hole in the veil
between Earth and Faerie, allowing a tidal wave of Cryptomantic magic to come coursing
through.
Combining Magic
Magic is additive – types of magic do not cancel each other out. There is no “water beats fire” to
the classes of magic in this world. Instead, magicians focus on combining magic to great effect.
Necromancy can summon a soul or reanimate a (soulless) corpse; biomancy can heal a body
(within limits). Neither alone can bring a creature back from the dead. Necromancy plus
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Biomancy has possibilities, but the resuscitation of the dead is either the realm of the most
powerful magicians or may require the addition of Cryptomancy. Stranger still is what happens
when Biomancy or Necromancy are combined with Technomancy. A technomancer working
with a biomancer can create cyborgs, bonding a living spirit and body to a mechanical arm for
spectacular healing. A technomancer working with a necromancer can do truly horrific things,
like sealing the soul of an enemy into a physical prison for eternity. Adding Cryptomancy to any
magic will have decidedly wild results.
There are legends of particularly powerful witches and wizards who can wield multiple classes
of magic.
Magical Objects and Weaknesses
Magic can be augmented by Talismans (see the “Wearables” section below) or weakened by
Wards. Facing sufficiently weak magic and wearing a sufficient number of Wards, an Inquisitor
can be rendered immune to magical attacks. And, yes, there is significant suspicion among the
magical community that the Church’s wards are themselves some kind of magic. (Spoilers: they
are.)
Magic also gets weird when it comes to certain naturally-occurring phenomena. Silver is highly
effective against magicians and monsters alike, but the reasons are a mystery, even to the oldest
and wisest magicians. Running water is disruptive to Necromancy and Technomancy, but not
Biomancy. The prevailing theory is that somehow the running water weakens the bonds between
the summoned dead or forged creation and the magician, but how exactly this works is a mystery
as well. Bizarrely, technomancers and necromancers can still control running water and make it
break free of its banks, which is one reason magicians scoff at those who go to great lengths to
surround their homes with running water (see “Shelter” in the World section above).
Costs
There is no explicit “mana” system in this world, but spell casting definitely requires great
energy and stamina. A necromancer cannot raise an endless army of the undead, but a more
powerful, adept necromancer can raise a larger army than a younger, untrained necromancer.
There have been some instances of raw natural power occurring in new magicians, but such
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cases are extraordinarily rare. Similarly, there are no mana potions in this world to instantly
recharge a magician’s spell casting ability. Once a magician is truly exhausted, the only cure is
rest – and, just as with physical exertion, extreme exhaustion both takes longer to recover from
and can be life-threatening. Also, not all magicians of the same type have the same powers.
Magical Creatures
The origins of magic in this world are a mystery, and will be delved more deeply into as the story
unfolds. One thing it’s not is tied to devils. Magic and monsters in this world are both naturally
occurring. There may be secret races of ancient vampires, there may be monstrous creatures that
resemble demons, but as much as the Church might insist otherwise, there are no gods or devils.
Other Abilities
Other such naturally-occurring proficiencies that seem like they might be related to magic are
appearing with increasing regularity around the world, which the Church is incredibly curious
about. Young children with high degrees of empathy bordering on the telepathic are tested for
Necromancy but come back negative; other children with uncanny abilities to heal or connect
with animals are tested for Biomancy but come back negative. Many in the Church view this as
either a promising development – they can use these youths to gain access to near-magic abilities
without risking contamination of the evil of magic – or as a threat, if humanity is developing
magical powers as a species (think the mutants in X-Men as the “next stage of human evolution”).
I also began to develop maps for my world, although the details for this wouldn't come until
much later.
Maps
To illustrate just how massive an impact the Disaster had on the United States:
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The Great Disaster reduced the United States to 27 surviving states, undoing over a hundred
years’ worth of colonization. While some initially perceived this as a sudden deus ex machina
victory for Native Americans, the Disaster actually had a horrific genocidal impact on them
instead. Anyone who was living in this area when the spell hit was either killed or transformed
into something monstrous, eradicating countless Native Americans and settlers at the same time.
Roads and train tracks were instantly destroyed. In effect, all the states on the Eastern side of the
Mississippi were abruptly reverted to frontier states, and just as suddenly become the new front
for a war with the unknown.
The Human Lens at the Center
Much like I did with Michael Mwonaji for Dry City: Turning Points, I knew I needed a character
to put a human lens at the center of this world build – one whose hero’s journey would also
function as a tour through this world. Further, I’m enough of a traditional storyteller to want the
character to be much more than a mere avatar. After all, world-centric narrative design and
character-centric storytelling are not mutually exclusive. So that’s what I set out to do.
The character I came up with was a young woman living in a small farming community in the
now-frontier state of Illinois. I imagined that in a world where corrupted organized religion had
seized power to the extent of a near-police state, then magic would obviously be the new punk
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rock – and certified fake stage magicians would be the hottest tickets for rebellious teenagers and
the like. Thus, my young protagonist would be a huge fan of magic, much to her parents’ chagrin.
However, I also knew that wanted to give her parents a reason for being so adamant that their
daughter not pursue this passion, beyond them being boring, two-dimensional clichés. Instead, I
landed on the parents being essentially illegal immigrants, magicians who were doing their
absolute damnedest to not be noticed by the Church’s equivalent of ICE. To add narrative
tension, and a window into the history of this world, I chose to have the girl’s parents play a
crucial role in the creation of the Great Disaster in the first place, so not only are they illegal
immigrants but they could also be considered war criminals. This then led to the obvious
storyline – of course the girl has to disobey her parents’ orders and go see a touring magic show.
And of course this has to lead to the girls’ parents being discovered. And of course this has to
lead to the parents being seized, and the girl being launched on a prolonged quest to get them
back. (This also started to point towards a recurring theme for the story, that of penance, but I’ll
get back to that in a bit.) This quest would take the girl across the country and into the Great
Wilderness, thus giving the audience the tour through the world I wanted them to take. Along the
way she would meet multiple characters that reflected a myriad of ways this central deviation
from reality had impacted how people live their lives.
In this way, my heroine Casey Smith was born.
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4. Resonant Simple-Story Myths
Many of the most globally successful storyworlds have a resonant simple-story myth at their
cores. Much of Star Wars’ success has been laid at the feet of its adherence to the
monomyth formula outlined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
While an industry over-relying on the same simple story formula breeds boredom (as
evidenced by the frequent criticism leveled against superhero movies and Disney princess
movies as historically being too formulaic), identifying a core simple-story that resonates
with an aspect of human life and using that as the “beating human heart” at the core of
your story can help that story gain a broad, global audience.
This approach can help overcome transmedia resistance by using a simple, understandable
narrative formula as the architecture upon which complex, interconnected narratives can
be built. The greater and more complex the storyworld, the more rudimentary the core
simple story may need to be, with each component representing some progression of that
simple story. If an extension clearly moves the central simple-story forward even in a
relatively small way, it becomes easier for a potential consumer to understand where that
story fits in the overall experience, and why it’s worth their energy. These simple-stories
can be built around conflict, relationships, or mysteries, but they should represent a
sufficiently basic human experience that it can resonate with virtually anyone. (This is, of
course, also related to the storyworld’s theme.)

When we talk about storyworlds, it's distressingly easy to overemphasize the world and neglect
the story. This is a crucial error, because – as we'll revisit repeatedly – Rule 1 is don't suck,
which, in this context, means that first and foremost you have to tell a good story.
So what makes a good story? What does that mean if you're trying to craft a storyworld that will
resonate across multiple generations and multiple cultures?

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The Art of the Simple-Story
Let's start with one of the most well-known narrative theorists in the world. Love him or hate
him, in 1972 Joseph Campbell and his The Hero with a Thousand Faces had a major impact on
how storytellers – especially those in Hollywood – think about storytelling.
Campbell argued that myths across multiple cultures around the world shared a similar, simple
archetypal formula, which he called the hero's journey:
⁠109

Campbell's work inspired a veritable army of disciples, including (most famously) George Lucas,
whose Star Wars follows Campbell's model almost to the letter.
110

109
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHerosJourney
110
Lucas and Campbell actually had something of a mutual admiration society going on.
http://www.starwars.com/news/mythic-discovery-within-the-inner-reaches-of-outer-space-joseph-
campbell-meets-george-lucas-part-i
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Campbell's model was famously revisited and refined in 1992 by Christopher Vogler in his
seminal screenwriting text The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers:
⁠111

In addition to refining Campbell's stages of the journey, Vogler also dove deeper into the
archetypal characters that populated that journey: the Hero, of course, but also the Mentor, the
Threshold Guardian, the Herald, the Shapeshifter, the Shadow, the Ally and the Trickster, all of
whom played different but critical roles in the journey.
In 2004, Christopher Booker argued that there's not just one basic story plot. In his book The
Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Booker lists describes the seven as follows:
1. Overcoming the Monster. The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic
force (often evil) which threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist's homeland.
2. Rags to Riches. The poor protagonist acquires things such as power, wealth, and
a mate, before losing it all and gaining it back upon growing as a person.
3. The Quest. The protagonist and some companions set out to acquire an important
object or to get to a location, facing many obstacles and temptations along the
way.

111
Huntley 2007.
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4. Voyage and Return. The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after
overcoming the threats it poses to him or her, returns with experience.
5. Comedy. Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a
dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse
circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion. (Booker makes sure
to stress that comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict
becomes more and more confusing, but is at last made plain in a single clarifying
event. Most romances fall into this category.)
6. Tragedy. The protagonist is a hero with one major character flaw or great mistake
which is ultimately their undoing. Their unfortunate end evokes pity at their folly
and the fall of a fundamentally 'good' character.
7. Rebirth. During the course of the story, an important event forces the main
character to change their ways, often making them a better person.
112

Are seven plots too overly simplistic for you? Then may I suggest Ronald Tobias' 1993 book 20
Master Plots and How to Build Them, which lists the "possible plots" as follows:
1. Quest. The hero searches for something, someone, or somewhere. In reality, they
may be searching for themselves, with the outer journey mirrored internally. They
may be joined by a companion, who takes care of minor detail and whose
limitations contrast with the hero's greater qualities.
2. Adventure. The protagonist goes on an adventure, much like a quest, but with
less of a focus on the end goal or the personal development of hero hero. In the
adventure, there is more action for action's sake.
3. Pursuit. In this plot, the focus is on chase, with one person chasing another (and
perhaps with multiple and alternating chase). The pursued person may be often
cornered and somehow escape, so that the pursuit can continue. Depending on the
story, the pursued person may be caught or may escape.
4. Rescue. In the rescue, somebody is captured, who must be released by the hero or
heroic party. A triangle may form between the protagonist, the antagonist and the

112

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheSevenBasicPlots?from=Main.TheSevenBasicPlots
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victim. There may be a grand duel between the protagonist and antagonist, after
which the victim is freed.
5. Escape. In a kind of reversal of the rescue, a person must escape, perhaps with
little help from others. In this, there may well be elements of capture and unjust
imprisonment. There may also be a pursuit after the escape.
6. Revenge. In the revenge plot, a wronged person seeks retribution against the
person or organization which has betrayed or otherwise harmed them or loved
ones, physically or emotionally. This plot depends on moral outrage for gaining
sympathy from the audience.
7. The Riddle. The riddle plot entertains the audience and challenges them to find
the solution before the hero, who steadily and carefully uncovers clues and hence
the final solution. The story may also be spiced up with terrible consequences if
the riddle is not solved in time.
8. Rivalry. In rivalry, two people or groups are set as competitors that may be good
hearted or as bitter enemies. Rivals often face a zero-sum game, in which there
can only be one winner, for example where they compete for a scarce resource or
the heart of a single other person.
9. Underdog. The underdog plot is similar to rivalry, but where one person (usually
the hero) has less advantage and might normally be expected to lose. The
underdog usually wins through greater tenacity and determination (and perhaps
with the help of friendly others).
10. Temptation. In the temptation plot, a person is tempted by something that, if
taken, would somehow diminish them, often morally. Their battle is thus internal,
fighting against their inner voices which tell them to succumb.
11. Metamorphosis. In this fantastic plot, the protagonist is physically transformed,
perhaps into beast or perhaps into some spiritual or alien form. The story may
then continue with the changed person struggling to be released or to use their
new form for some particular purpose. Eventually, the hero is released, perhaps
through some great act of love.
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12. Transformation. The transformation plot leads to change of a person in some
way, often driven by unexpected circumstance or event. After setbacks, the person
learns and usually becomes something better.
13. Maturation. The maturation plot is a special form of transformation, in which a
person grows up. The veils of younger times are lost as they learn and grow. Thus
the rudderless youth finds meaning or perhaps an older person re-finds their
purpose.
14. Love. The love story is a perennial tale of lovers finding one another, perhaps
through a background of danger and woe. Along the way, they become separated
in some way, but eventually come together in a final joyous reunion.
15. Forbidden Love. The story of forbidden love happens when lovers are breaking
some social rules, such as in an adulterous relationship or worse. The story may
thus turn around their inner conflicts and the effects of others discovering their
tryst.
16. Sacrifice. In sacrifice, the nobler elements of the human sprit are extolled as
someone gives much more than most people would give. The person may not start
with the intent of personal sacrifice and may thus be an unintentional hero, thus
emphasizing the heroic nature of the choice and act.
17. Discovery. The discovery plot is strongly focused on the character of the hero
who discovers something great or terrible and hence must make a difficult choice.
The importance of the discovery might not be known at first and the process of
revelation be important to the story.
18. Wretched Excess. In stories of wretched excess, the protagonist goes beyond
normally accepted behavior as the world looks on, horrified, perhaps in
realization that 'there before the grace of God go I' and that the veneer of
civilization is indeed thin.
19. Ascension. In the ascension plot, the protagonist starts in the virtual gutter, as a
sinner of some kind. The plot then shows their ascension to becoming a better
person, often in response to stress that would defeat a normal person. Thus they
achieve deserved heroic status.
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20. Descension. In the opposite to ascension, a person of initially high standing
descends to the gutter and moral turpitude, perhaps sympathetically as they are
unable to handle stress and perhaps just giving in to baser vices.
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20 plot templates still not enough for you? For full-blown, over-the-top narrative formula
goodness let's go back to the 1920s for William Wallace Cook's 1928 masterpiece Plotto: The
Master Book of All Plots. Cook was a pulp novelist whose breathtaking prolificity earned him the
nickname "The Man who Deforested Canada." Over his 44-year career, Cook wrote hundreds of
books. In a foreword to a later edition of Plotto, Paul Collins described Cook's staggering output
as follows: "In 1910 alone, [Cook] conjured a staggering fifty-four nickel novels, or just over one
a week. At times, Cook would pound out an entire manuscript in a twenty-four hour marathon
session. Each production, though, was always carefully molded to the same 40,000 word format
of sixteen chapters of five single-spaced pages each.” Plotto is Cook's how-to book, a kind of
story generator with entire sections of possible characters, events, plot twists, and so on.

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http://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/tobias_plots.htm
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This is, of course, evocative of folklorist Tzvetan Todorov's famous 1973 The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to a Literary Genre and Vladimir Propp's 1928 Morphology of the Folktale.
Both of these structuralists analyzed a massive body of fairy tales and folklore to identify
recurring characters, elements and other patterns. By breaking down countless stories into their
base components or mythemes, they demonstrated that most stories are remixes of similar
components. Whether those stories adhere to a single simple archetypal plot, one of 20, or as a
recombination of hundreds of subcomponents, the underlying principle is sound: great stories
from around the world have an astonishing amount in common, and within a surprisingly small
range of difference the components of a good story are surprisingly consistent from one culture
to another. A very basic formula like Campbell's hero's journey can translate into virtually any
language for virtually any culture, which is one reason why a monomythic Star Wars has such
global appeal.
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Many of these stories can be boiled down to an extremely basic formula:
Once upon a time…
Every day…
Until one day…
Because of that…
Because of that…
Until finally…
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Because of that…
Until finally…
And ever since then…
The moral of the story is…
Sound familiar? It should – this is the "story spine" approach that Pixar uses for all of its films,
and is taught in Pixar's Khan Academy course.
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It also, funnily enough, follows much the same
structure as McDowell's "What if? Then what? Then what? So what?" worldbuilding approach
described earlier, but with more of an eye towards generating plot.

Case Studies: Simple-Stories in Pop Culture Epics
To test this out, let's begin with a basic template that draws from the Campbell/Vogler model,
tweaked a bit to more closely adhere to Pixar's approach:
Once there was a [hero] who, more than anything, wanted [hero desire], until one
day [inciting incident].
Unfortunately, [villain] wanted [villain desire].
So, under the guidance of [mentor] and with the help of [ally 1], [ally 2] and [ally
3], they set out to [action].
But then, they discover that [setback/escalation of stakes].
So, they set out to [escalating action] until finally they [climax] and [resolution]!
It's astonishing how many classic pop-culture stories fit nicely into this template. In an exercise
with my students, I present a populated version of the template with the details obscured, and see
how many guesses it takes them to figure out the story:

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Once there was a [restless farmboy] who, more than anything, wanted [to see the
world and fight back against the evil ruler] until one day [the rebels come to the
hero's home].
Unfortunately, [the evil ruler] wanted [to destroy its enemies and rule everyone
forever].
So, under the guidance of [an elderly warrior] and with the help of [a charming
rogue], [a giant beast], and [two jesters], they set out to [rescue the kidnapped
princess].
But then, they discover that [the villain is about to become unstoppable].
So, they set out to [stop the villain's plan] until finally they [destroy the villain's
stronghold] and [save the world]!
This is, of course, Star Wars. Here's another:
Once there was a [normal girl] who, more than anything, wanted [a normal life]
until one day [she discovered her secret destiny].
Unfortunately, [monsters] wanted [to kill her and all her friends].
So, under the guidance of [a wise scholar] and with the help of [a genius], [a good
monster], and [a jester], they set out to [kill the monsters].
But then, they discover that [there is an even bigger monster pulling the strings].
So, they set out to [find the ultimate monster] until finally they [kill the ultimate
monster] and [return victorious to a (mostly) normal life]!
This one is, of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Another:
Once there was a [quiet man] who, more than anything, wanted [to be left alone]
until one day [he discovered a special object].
Unfortunately, [an ancient evil] wanted [the special object].
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So, under the guidance of [a great wizard] and with the help of [a deposed ruler],
[the hero’s best friend], and [two rival warriors], they set out to [stop the ancient
evil].
But then, they discover that [the special object is cursed, and is killing the hero].
So, they set out to [destroy the special object] until finally they [destroy it and
render the ancient evil powerless] and [restore the rightful ruler of the land]!
Did you recognize Lord of the Rings? How about this one?
Once there was a [wealthy playboy] who, more than anything, wanted [live
happily with his family] until one day [villains kill his family].
Unfortunately, [criminals] wanted [to spread chaos].
So, under the guidance of [a shadowy genius] and with the help of [the law], [the
hero’s surrogate father] and [the hero’s surrogate children], they set out to [restore
order].
But then, they discover that [the mentor is the real villain].
So, they set out to [restore order] until finally they [outsmart and exile the villain]
and [restore peace and order to the land]!
This one is a little trickier. You might have recognized it as the story of Batman, but this raises a
stranger question: which Batman? In Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio's 1991 Many Lives
of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (and their 2015 sequel with
Will Brooker, Many More Lives of the Batman), they point out that what we think of as Batman
is actually an aggregation over time of many different characteristics from many different
authors. We'll come back to this in a few chapters, but this particular application of the
archetypal formula applies very well to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, which has Bruce
Wayne's 'shadowy genius' mentor Ra's al Ghul return in the third act to implement his plan to
destroy Gotham City.
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The point is, the basic story of most of these great pop-culture epics is remarkably similar. This
can be considered the primary simple-story of the franchise or storyworld. Not all stories in the
storyworld will adhere to this formula, and as the simple-story develops and takes on new details
then it will evolve into something that doesn't so closely adhere to this "lowest common
denominator" of a formula, but it remains a powerful starting point.

The Simple-Story Spark Generator
I like to use a version of this I call the Simple-Story Spark Generator to help me brainstorm
possible simple-stories set in the world I'm trying to develop. The premise here is simple: you
use a combination of random chance, pre-seeded classic archetypal characters and empty spaces
to spark ideas.

1. Open up the Simple-Story Spark Generator.xlsx Excel file and take out a d12 die
or load up http://www.roll-dice-online.com.
2. Cut and paste the row with the story template in it, making a new copy for every
round you play.
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3. Roll the d12 for each of the variables (hero, hero goal, inciting incident, etc.).
4. If you land on a blank cell, fill it in with your own idea. Plausible is better than
funny or absurd for these exercises.
5. Once you’ve completed a round, create a fresh copy of the template, and repeat
the process of rolling the die to populate all the variables.
6. Pick one that you like as a starting point for your Central Story. The goal is not to
fully populate the spreadsheet, but to find one you are inspired to build on as your
storyworld for the overall project. You are not constrained to keep all, or even any,
of the variables, so long as it sparks something interesting.
Again, these are ideas. Not only does this help inspire possible stories set in your storyworld, it
also helps to test the breadth of possible stories in a new storyworld, and the clarity of your
storyworld's unique characteristics. If you have difficulty imagining how a particular
combination of elements could be done "in your storyworld's way" (as Death Troopers did
zombies "in a Star Wars way"), then you may need to revisit and redevelop your unique
storyworld characteristics.

Action: Evaluating Resonant Simple-Story Myths
1. Choose an existing storyworld for evaluation. Make a list of its main characters,
and determine which role in the story each character plays (the Hero, the Mentor,
the Threshold Guardian, the Herald, the Shapeshifter, the Shadow, the Ally or the
Trickster).
2. Identify the simple-story of the storyworld. Populate the simple-story template
with the details from your chosen storyworld. How well does the storyworld's
simple-story adhere to the formula?
3. If the simple-story does not adhere to Campbellian Hero's Journey formula, is
there another formula from Booker or Tobias' books that it does adhere to? How
well does that simple-story resonate with the storyworld's multiple target
audiences from "Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement"?

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Action: Creating Resonant Simple-Story Myths
Do the Simple-Story Spark Generator Exercise, set in your storyworld.
1. Open up the Simple-Story Spark Generator.xlsx Excel file and take out a d12 die
or load up http://www.roll-dice-online.com.
2. Cut and paste the row with the story template in it, making a new copy for every
round you play.
3. Roll the d12 for each of the variables (hero, hero goal, inciting incident, etc.).
4. If you land on a blank cell, fill it in with your own idea. Plausible is better than
funny or absurd for these exercises.
5. Once you’ve completed a round, create a fresh copy of the template, and repeat
the process of rolling the die to populate all the variables.
6. Pick one that you like as a starting point for your Central Story. The goal is not to
fully populate the spreadsheet, but to find one you are inspired to build on as your
storyworld for the overall project. You are not constrained to keep all, or even any,
of the variables, so long as it sparks something interesting. Put this Simple-Story
into section 3.2 of your template. (This will be updated later as you revise your
story and world.)

Example: Resonant Simple-Story Myths in Spookshow
When I began to flesh out my plan for Spookshow, I had a couple of characters already in mind.
As I described before, the human lens at the center of my world was going to be a young woman
whose fascination with magic turned out to be a much bigger deal than she'd ever thought, and I
knew I wanted to send her on a roadtrip through this world to serve as the avatar for the audience.
The question then became, what form that roadtrip story would take, and what other characters
she would meet along the way?
I'll concede that I tend to come up with characters before I necessarily come up with plots, so I
already knew that I wanted to have my protagonist have a younger sister, giving my story a kind
of Fullmetal Alchemist dynamic. I also knew, like Fullmetal Alchemist, I wanted my protagonist
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to do something that would get the kid sister into serious trouble, and have the need to put that
right serve as a major motivation for the rest of the story. I also knew I wanted to have at least
one romantic interest for her in the story that was not a typical male lead, but someone who was
smart and creative in a way that complemented my heroine instead of competed with her.
After playing with the Simple-Story Spark Generator for a while (and seriously massaging the
results), I came up with this:
Once there was a young woman who, more than anything, wanted to run away
from home to become a famous magician, until one day she convinces her would-
be boyfriend and her younger sister to sneak off with her to see a traveling
Spookshow.
Unfortunately, the Church and its Inquisitors want to exterminate all unholy
magicians, and attack the performance. In the chaos, she is irrevocably bound to
the ringmaster's magic wand, the sister is bitten by one of the monsters and begins
to change, the ringmaster is killed, and two of the other members of the
Spookshow are kidnapped by the Inquisitors – including the one who might be
able to change her sister back to normal!
So, under the guidance of the ringmaster's ghost and with the help of a
technomancer, the transformed sister, the inventor boyfriend and her parents (who
have secretly been magicians in hiding), she sets out to rescue the kidnapped
members of the Spookshow and regain her sister's human form.
But then, in the rescue attempt her parents are taken by the Church, and she and
the Spookshow discover that the Church wants to use the magicians' forbidden
magic to reshape reality itself.
So, as she learns she's stronger with her friends and family than alone, she and the
Spookshow set out across the Great Wilderness for the Church's secret Cathedral
of the West, where finally they rescue her parents and defeat the leaders of the
Church to save the world!
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Presto – a good, strong Simple-Story that could resonate with a pretty wide audience. Spookshow
was starting to make the shift from world to storyworld.
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5. Extensible Character Design
Audiences are more likely to follow characters across multiple media if they are
recognizable across multiple media, therefore special attention should be paid to ensuring
that key characters can be expanded beyond their first or primary medium. In other words,
each key character should have an extensible character design. This approach can inform
character silhouettes (as in animation), their designs (including color palettes), the sounds
and words associated with those characters, and even their gestures.
Not only can such an approach reduce resistance by making that character instantly
recognizable in that new medium (versus a more unrecognizable reinterpretation of the
character), but it can also increase the energy an audience is willing to invest in following
that character to another medium to discover how that character works in another medium.
For example, the Marvel Comics characters Wolverine and Nightcrawler both have
particular sound effects associated with them (‘snikt’ and ‘bamf’, respectively), which
motivated some fans to attend the FOX X-Men movies to actually hear those strange
sounds.

In “World-Centric Narrative Design (with a Human Lens at the Center)” we discussed the
importance of using a human-level perspective to kick the tires of the storyworld you’re building,
and in “Resonant Simple-Story Myths” we talked about the importance of a very human,
globally-accessible plot. In his Poetics Aristotle argued that plot is the most important element of
any story. I can tell you a tale of France and Germany going to war and have you hanging on
every word to see which side wins and how. I don’t have to ever introduce any of the warriors by
name – ‘France’ and ‘Germany’ will suffice as characters. To Aristotle, the plot is the thing.
However, even in this example, the story only works if I, the storyteller, can successfully make
you, the audience, care about who wins. Having a great world isn’t enough if the audience
doesn’t care about your Bilbo Baggins or your Luke Skywalker. Great characters have always
been at the heart of any great story, and even if those ‘characters’ are abstract nations instead of
people, they have to be sufficiently engaging to an audience to make the audience care about
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them. How a character becomes engaging is both different and the same across varying media
types.
At their core, a character in any medium has to create some kind of emotional reaction in the
audience. At their most basic levels, a villain has to be someone that you would boo, and a hero
has to be someone that you would cheer. More complex characters can be more interesting
(sympathetic villains, flawed heroes, et cetera), but a character that generates zero emotional
reaction in the audience is just that – a character no one cares about. If the audience doesn’t care
about the characters, they are unlikely to care about the story.
Aristotle might argue that it’s the actions Hercules makes that makes for good, audience-
engaging drama, but I contend that emotional reactions are generated in audiences not merely by
what a character does, but in how they do it. Without some degree of character development and
differentiation there’s no reason for audiences to keep coming back for the “next episode” – the
character could be easily exchanged for any number of musclebound adventurers. Modern action
filmmakers may have proven that audiences are drawn to things blowing up, but many audiences
are compelled to see another Die Hard or Indiana Jones film not to discover what the director
will blow up next, but how the character will personally react to those fireworks. It’s not merely
the action taken by the character, but how and why that character reacts that way. Uttering
“yippee-ki-yay” as a building explodes or cracking a whip to fend off a Nazi are both actions,
yes, but they are character actions; they are actions infused with the personalities, emotions, and
motivations of these specific characters. Watching a zeppelin explode is interesting, but watching
Indiana Jones react to a zeppelin explode is more interesting, especially once we’ve become
emotionally invested in the younger Dr. Jones. This is the same logic that fuels most popular
narrative entertainment, from the stories of Sherlock Holmes to each week’s episode of NCIS –
it’s not just what happens, but how it happens, and to, and by, whom.

Plot-Driven versus Character-Driven Stories
To push this even further, how a character reacts is not as narratively powerful as how a
character chooses to act. A character that is constantly reacting to things outside of their control
is, by definition, disempowered. If a storyteller comes up with a plot and then forces their
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protagonist through it, the feeling can be the same as a roller coaster. Even the best roller
coasters still necessarily have the feeling of “being along for the ride”. A story can be much more
engaging and exciting when the audience is invited along to see what a character chooses to do
and what the results of those decisions are. Consider plot-driven stories versus character-driven
stories like so:

Plot-Driven Stories
• Present a memorable series of events
• Emphasis is placed on the twists and turns of the plot, action, external conflict, and
frequently spectacular setpieces
• The events of the story determine the character’s reactions, which may not result in
significant character growth

Character-Driven Stories
• Follow a memorable character along a journey
• Emphasis is placed on the character’s arc, wherein the character experiences significant,
transformative growth along that journey
• The character’s personal evolutions and decisions determine the shape of the plot
Ideally, what you want is a mix of both. This is one of the greatest narrative engines that drives
George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones – decisions characters make early in the series have
huge, epic ramifications across the duration of the series. Martin’s audience frequently knows
that the character is making a bad choice (hell, frequently the characters themselves are well
aware that they’re being forced to make bad decisions) and the narrative tension comes from
seeing what the fallout from those bad choices will be.
For example, in the seventh season of the television version of Game of Thrones (spoilers!), Jon
Snow decides to lead an expedition of warriors beyond the Wall that separates the relative safety
of the Seven Kingdoms from the monster-filled frozen wasteland of the North. Their goal is to
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capture one of the zombie-like White Walkers and bring it back, to convince the leaders of the
warring kingdoms to set aside their petty feud for the Iron Throne and join together to beat back
this much larger threat. It’s a very good reason, but a lousy plan – and Snow and his ally and
burgeoning love interest Daenerys Targaryen both pretty much realize this going in. When the
plan predictably leads to Snow and his band getting trapped by an army of White Walkers,
Daenerys chooses to fly her dragons over the wall to rescue them – another “good reason, lousy
plan” moment. The White Walkers bring down one of the dragons, which not only costs our
heroes one of their dearly-held weapons but, given the White Walkers’ zombie powers, also
gives them a zombie dragon of their own. The characters’ choices lead to other choices in
reaction, which in turn drives the plot – the unfolding story is thus the result of the characters’
own agency as opposed to the characters being purely reactive.
In The Fantasy Fiction Formula, Deborah Chester proscribes an approach like this as “scene,
sequel, scene, sequel”. In this model (a favorite of New York Times bestselling author and student
of Chester’s Jim Butcher), an action-packed scene is followed by another sequel scene in which
the characters regroup and choose what to do next. This then leads to another action-packed
scene, followed by another sequel. The resulting sense is one of a story breathing, and building
up a sense of ongoing momentum.
Structurally, this also affords an opportunity for narrative extension in explaining why characters
make certain actions. A character’s motivation can be one of the greatest mysteries in such a
character-driven story, second perhaps only to the mystery of what that character will do next.
Providing more information on where that character came from in an extension is a great
example of additive comprehension, which we’ll come back to in a few chapters.
Long story short, what you're trying to do is create a storyworld that supports multiple types of
characters who can make a wide range of choices within a shared set of parameters/rules, and
thus generate a wide range of possible stories.

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Designing Character Types
Let’s revisit the Simple-Story template and Campbell and Vogler’s character types from the
previous chapter:
Once there was a [hero] who, more than anything, wanted [hero desire], until one
day [inciting incident].
Unfortunately, [villain] wanted [villain desire].
So, under the guidance of [mentor] and with the help of [ally 1], [ally 2] and [ally
3], they set out to [action].
But then, they discover that [setback/escalation of stakes].
So, they set out to [escalating action] until finally they [climax] and [resolution]!
According to Campbell and Vogler, there are eight primary character types: Hero, Mentor, Ally,
Herald, Trickster, Shapeshifter and Shadow.
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According to Mythcreants.com, these serve the
following functions.
1. Hero: “The hero is the audience’s personal tour guide on the adventure that is the
story. It’s critical that the audience can relate to them, because they experience the
story through their eyes. During the journey, the hero will leave the world they are
familiar with and enter a new one. This new world will be so different that
whatever skills the hero used previously will no longer be sufficient. Together, the
hero and the audience will master the rules of the new world, and save the day.”
2. Mentor: “The hero has to learn how to survive in the new world incredibly fast,
so the mentor appears to give them a fighting chance. This mentor will describe
how the new world operates, and instruct the hero in using any innate abilities
they possess. The mentor will also gift the hero with equipment, because a level
one hero never has any decent weapons or armor.”

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Note there is no "Prize,” “Love Interest” or "Damsel in Distress" character type. Knock that crap off.
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3. Ally: “The hero will have some great challenges ahead; too great for one person
to face them alone. They’ll need someone to distract the guards, hack into the
mainframe, or carry their gear. Plus, the journey could get a little dull without
another character to interact with.”
4. Herald: “The herald appears near the beginning to announce the need for change
in the hero’s life. They are the catalyst that sets the whole adventure in motion.
While they often bring news of a threat in a distant land, they can also simply
show a dissatisfied hero a tempting glimpse of a new life. Occasionally they
single the hero out, picking them for a journey they wouldn’t otherwise take.”
5. Trickster: “The trickster adds fun and humor to the story. When times are
gloomy or emotionally tense, the trickster gives the audience a welcome break.
Often, the trickster has another job: challenging the status quo. A good trickster
offers an outside perspective and opens up important questions. They’re also great
for lampshading the story or the actions of the other characters.” “Lampshading” is
the storyteller’s trick of having one character point out the ludicrousness of the characters’
actions. Han Solo did this repeatedly in Star Wars. For example, enlisting a tribe of teddy
bears to take on the Empire is a ridiculous idea, but Han stepped in to shrug, “Short help
is better than no help at all.”
6. Shapeshifter: “The shapeshifter blurs the line between ally and enemy. Often
they begin as an ally, then betray the hero at a critical moment. Other times, their
loyalty is in question as they waver back and forth. Regardless, they provide a
tantalizing combination of appeal and possible danger. Shapeshifters benefit
stories by creating interesting relationships among the characters, and by adding
tension to scenes filled with allies.”
7. Guardian: “The guardian, or threshold guardian, tests the hero before they face
great challenges. They can appear at any stage of the story, but they always block
an entrance or border of some kind. Their message to the hero is clear: ‘go home
and forget your quest.’ They also have a message for the audience: ‘this way lies
danger.’ Then the hero must prove their worth by answering a riddle, sneaking
past, or defeating the guardian in combat.”
8. Shadow: “Shadows are villains in the story. They exist to create threat and
conflict, and to give the hero something to struggle against. Like many of the
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other archetypes, shadows do not have to be characters specifically – the dark side
of the force is just as much a shadow for Luke as Darth Vader is. The shadow is
especially effective if it mirrors the hero in some way. It shows the audience the
twisted person the hero could become if they head down the wrong path, and
highlights the hero’s internal struggle. This, in turn, makes the hero’s success
more meaningful.”
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Here’s the crucial distinction between telling a story and creating a storyworld. In a story, a
character might show up to play the role of mentor and then disappear, never to be seen again.
However, in a storyworld (or, I’d argue, in a really well-told story), those characters are
sufficiently well-rounded to have compelling stories of their own. Such well-rounded characters
each have their own arc, which means that though they may be dominant in one particular
character type, they are all their own kinds of heroes, with their own journeys.

Character Journeys
In pop culture, this shift away from a single hero to a rhizomatic network of multiple characters
leading interconnected lives (as discussed in Chapter 3) has plenty of precedent: soap operas like
The Young and the Restless, General Hospital or even ER are built on similar models, where
multiple characters have their own intersecting storylines that unfold over years, if not decades.
A similar model can be found in shared comics universes like those for Marvel or DC, where any
given week finds multiple heroes, each with their own books, teaming up, locked in mortal
combat, or simply popping into each others’ stories. This intertextual connectivity has, of course,
had a seismic impact on Hollywood, where the shift away from standalone films to a “shared
universe” model has had its share of hits (the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars) and misses
(Universal’s Dark Universe, Warner Bros.’ DC Extended Universe). Beneath the franchise
model, the same interwoven-narratives approach is being taken within single shows or films,
with Game of Thrones being a perfect example of this on television and Star Wars: The Last Jedi
arguably being more of a tapestry of character arcs for the four leads (Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo
Ren) than a single three-act story. Note how not every character is a hero, but every character has

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https://mythcreants.com/blog/the-eight-character-archetypes-of-the-heros-journey/
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a story. The Last Jedi is one such example of multiple intersecting character journeys, most
outside the Campbellian model of the Hero’s Journey:
• The Mentor's Journey is frequently the end of a hero’s journey, when the hero “returns
home with the elixir” and passes on their knowledge to a new hero. This may feature a
struggle to accept that their own heyday is past, and their students will surpass them, or –
as in The Last Jedi – a crisis when conflict arises between master and pupil. Examples:
Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Bilbo Baggins
• The Ally’s Journey is frequently a different perspective on the hero’s journey, as the
hero calls the Ally to adventure. This may often serve as the catalyst for the Ally to
become heroic themselves, and to shift from sidekick to hero in their own right.
Examples: Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Samwise Gamgee
• The Herald's Journey is often tangential to the main story, as the Herald is frequently
either a role played by a different character (such as a mentor or ally) or a different hero,
triggering a secondary adventure for a secondary hero (see Ally’s journey). Examples:
Rubeus Hagrid, R2-D2, Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins
• The Trickster’s Journey frequently finds the character maturing from primarily comic
relief to a position of greater responsibility (albeit still remaining somewhat puckish).
Examples: Han Solo, Merry + Pippin, Dobby
• The Shapeshifter’s Journey frequently finds the character choosing a side and settling
into a position of greater stability (albeit still remaining somewhat gray). Examples:
Lando Calrissian, Catwoman, Boromir, Gollum
• The Guardian’s Journey can also be primarily tangential, because, like the Herald, the
Threshold Guardian is frequently a bit part or a role played by a character that is
primarily something else, such as a mentor. Examples: Yoda, the Doorknockers in
Labyrinth, the Wall Guard in Stardust
• The Shadow’s Journey is the most powerful when it is a dark mirror of the hero’s own,
a cautionary tale about making the wrong choices. It is most often one of redemption, or
of great tragedy. Examples: Darth Vader, Gollum

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Note that these are not the only character types; in fact, most characters play multiple roles –
especially those characters that teach the hero something, or are heroes themselves. Yoda is a
Threshold Guardian, Hero and Mentor; Hermione is an Ally, Hero and Mentor; Rubeus Hagrid is
a Herald and Mentor, and so on.
Transmedia producer Jeff Gomez points to this shift away from single-hero stories as evidence of
a growing audience dissatisfaction with the classic Campbellian Hero’s Journey and an
increasing interest in what he calls “The Collective Journey”:
What’s fascinating about Game of Thrones is that we are not told right from
wrong. The audience is made privy to dozens of differing points of view about
how the world works, and what needs to be done about it. Equal weight is given
to the perspectives of women characters, poor characters, gays, exiles, and
immigrants. Ask anyone watching [whose] “side” they’re on, and they’ll name a
different character.
You can argue that the series is just an exceptional soap opera; that we’ve seen its
like before. But if we look closely, there is a deeper design to the show. Anyone
can die, even the most heroic. Mentors get it wrong. Women are key players. The
plot is anything but linear, and deeply complicated. The violence is repulsive and
inglorious.
All of these seem to be intentional subversions of the common tropes of the
Campbellian Hero’s Journey that film and television writers have been using for
nearly a century. That makes Game of Thrones something new.
… Hero’s Journey stories are about how the individual actualizes by achieving
personal change, but Collective Journey stories are about how communities
actualize in their attempt to achieve systemic change.
These stories tell us that if we are awaiting a savior, we are consigning ourselves
to doom, and to erect one in his place can be just as bad. We, collectively, must
become our own salvation.
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Finally, in the narratives of all these shows, it becomes clear that systemic
challenges cannot truly be resolved by one side soundly defeating all others, or by
one side solving the crisis by themselves. To attempt to do so at the expense of all
others could well be apocalyptic.
Winter is coming, after all.
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Alignment
Another very useful tool for character design comes from perhaps a very obvious source, as it’s
provided a structure for designing characters since 1974: Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and
Dragons introduced the concept of alignment for characters, which at its most basic breaks down
as follows:
Lawful Good Neutral Good Chaotic Good
Lawful Neutral True Neutral Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Evil Neutral Evil Chaotic Evil

Such alignments help provide guidance to storytellers when deciding how a character will react
to a particular event or other prompt. A particularly useful Internet meme presents this concept as
follows:

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Gomez 2017. More on this in the “Importance of Themes” section.
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Like all systems, however, this can also be seen as overly simplistic. Game of Thrones, for
instance, requires something a touch more complicated:
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Character Classes
Another extremely useful character design tool from Dungeons and Dragons is the notion of
character classes. Character classes typically describe the technique, skills or approach a group
of characters use to approach a problem. As such, many of the character classes in a storyworld
are a direct result of different reactions to the central “what if” of the world.
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Character classes are spectacularly important to storyworlds because of the inherent invitation
popular storyworlds present to their audiences to imagine who they would be in such a
storyworld. In something like Dungeons and Dragons, character classes include Cleric, Fighter,
Mage, Thief, Mystic, Druid, Bard, Paladin, Ranger, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Warlock, and Warlord.
In Star Wars, character classes include Jedi, Sith, and Bounty Hunter. In Star Trek, the classes on
the Bridge Crew alone include Command (in their gold uniforms), Science/Medical Staff (in
their blue uniforms), and Engineering/Security/Communications (in their red uniforms).
Character classes also inform what organizations exist in a storyworld. Character classes are
frequently organized into specific groups of people, who have their own specific traditions,
abilities, and so on – all of which are reflections of the core rules of the world. Consider ten of
the houses in Game of Thrones and what their mottos say about each house’s philosophy and
overall character:
• House Arryn: As High as Honour
• House Mormont: Here We Stand
• House Greyjoy: We Do Not Sow
• House Clegane: Sworn to Lannister
• House Lannister: Hear Me Roar
• House Stark: Winter is Coming
• House Tyrell: Growing Strong
• House Targaryen: Fire and Blood
• House Baratheon: Ours is the Fury
• House Tully: Family, Duty, Honor
An even better example can be found in the four houses at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and
Wizardry in Harry Potter. The scene with the sorting hat in the first Harry Potter book
immediately prompted readers to wonder which house the hat would put them into: brave and
adventurous Gryffindor, ambitious and determined but cutthroat Slytherin, steadfast and
nurturing Hufflepuff, or creative, bookish and intellectual Ravenclaw?
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Establishing these

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I’m a Ravenclaw, naturally, with some shades of Hufflepuff. My wife Laura is a Hufflepuff with some
shades of Ravenclaw.
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character classes not only gave Rowling a shorthand to communicate the traits of new characters
in the world (when she first introduced Fanstastic Beasts and Where to Find Them protagonist
Newt Scamander as a Hufflepuff, fans around the world knew instantly what kind of character to
expect), but it also seeded the storyworld with a top-notch invitation for fan participation. We’ll
revisit this in much more detail in a few chapters.

Designing Extensible Characters for Multiple Media
What changes from medium to medium is how that character and their actions are
communicated to the audience. Any character that can support multiple stories can be considered
extensible in that regard, but as transmedia storytelling requires that character to extend across
multiple media, then characters in transmedia storyworlds must be designed to be extensible.
Extensible ikˈstensəb(ə)l). Adj. Able to be extended; extendable.
In other words, characters in transmedia storyworlds must be designed so they can be
recognizably expanded beyond their original medium and across multiple media. A transmedia
storyteller must therefore carefully consider such elements as the character’s name, their look
and silhouette, their sound, their gestures and trademark actions, and their embodied mysteries.

Name
From a purely business-minded standpoint, the character’s name is obviously important because
it must be brandable. Not only must the character have a distinctive name, but it should also
convey something about the nature of the character (and, thus, the franchise built out around
him). The best character names capture the tone of the IP, not just the character.
This characteristic is particularly overt in characters inspired by pulp adventures. First, “Indiana
Jones” is an excellent, brandable name because while ‘Indiana’ is a very “middle-America” state
and ‘Jones’ is a very common name, the juxtaposition of those two together is intriguing.
“Indiana Jones” is both everyman – and the good Dr. Jones’ scruffiness, his down-to-earth
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attitude and his barely-holding-on-by-his-fingertips adventuring style are all at the core of his
appeal – and yet also evocative of the 1940s pulp heroes that inspired Stephen Spielberg and
George Lucas to create him.
Second, consider “Lara Croft” from Eidos’ Tomb Raider. Both halves of Ms. Croft’s name are
sexy and aristocratic, capturing her more highborn origins. (Well, the original, pre-2012 Lara
Croft, anyway.) At the same time, however, her name also evokes “aloft” and “crag”, two words
that suggest adventuring.
Third, consider “Nathan Drake” from Naughty Dog’s Uncharted. Nathan is an excellent first
name because of how well it can be shortened to the more everyman ‘Nate’ (which is done
frequently by Drake’s partner in crime Sully). Drake works well as a last name because of its
(deliberate, and occasionally plot-informing) connection to the great explorer Sir Francis Drake,
which conveys the hero’s nature as a globetrotter.
Obviously, a little of this goes a long way. Star Wars is infamous for its characters’ names being
the epitome of pulp on-the-nose-ness, bordering on pure cheddar. Consider Luke Skywalker –
“Luke” being close to a shortened form of “Lucifer”, which, stripped of its devilish overtones,
means “light bringer”, and “Skywalker” meaning, well, “he who walks in the sky”. Similarly,
“Darth Vader” is only a slight syllabic breath away from “Dark Invader”
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or “Dark Father”,
which may or may not have been part of Lucas’ plan all along. As Lucas says in a 2005
interview with Rolling Stone:
"Darth" is a variation of dark. And "Vader" is a variation of father. So it's
basically Dark Father. All the names have history, but sometimes I make mistakes
– Luke was originally going to be called Luke Starkiller, but then I realized that
wan't appropriate for the character. It was appropriate for Anakin, but not his son.
I said, "Wait, we can't weigh this down too much – he's the one that redeems
him."
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Similarly, Darth Maul, Darth Sidious, Darth Tyranus… Star Wars will have reached peak franchise
fatigue when Darth Bugabuga makes his debut.
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Edwards 2005.
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The scoundrel “Han Solo” isn’t much better, a not-so-subtle variation of the “lone hand” – which
just so happens to be the title of a 1953 Western movie starring Joel McCrea, in which the titular
bank-robbing gang member is revealed to have been a heroic Pinkerton detective working
undercover all along. Given Lucas’ love for Westerns, this may or may not have been a
coincidence. Regardless, ‘Solo’ might have been just too on-the-nose, or at least implausible
enough to warrant an in-story explanation. As depicted in 2018’s Solo, the surname-less Han was
‘gifted’ his last name by an Imperial officer who thought he was being clever, when Han enlisted
in the Imperial forces.
Names have power, and resonant character names can have a measurable impact on the success
or failure of the story. This is exceptionally poetically put in a 1997 letter to The New York Times
from one Roger Bromfield:
Re: ''The Real 'Star Wars' '' (editorial, Feb. 9): Onomastics, the study of proper
names, may help explain the powerful attraction of the movie.
To christen the inhabitants of his faraway galaxies, George Lucas, the film's
creator, made numerous references to some earthly names: Darth Vader (dark
water), Luke Skywalker (walks through the sky), Princess Leia (lei -- garland of
flowers) and Han Solo (the lone hand). Mr. Lucas's poetry also extends to naming
planets. Consider his most prominent toponym, a cold planet named Hoth.
Such names are not science-fiction nonsense. They are indeed ''amalgams of
sound, emotion and association,'' such as Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays suggest
in their book, ''The Language of Names.'' And the theaters are again filled because
they resonate throughout the generations.
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That said, it’s also the case that a great story will trump weak branding, or, more to the point,
will create its own great branding. J.K. Rowling created a storyworld rife with unique, brandable
names and other terminology (Gryffindor! Slytherin! Voldemort!) but many of the names central
to the storyworld are either surprisingly common or wholly nonsensical. This is certainly a bit of

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Bromfield 1997.
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a stretch, but consider Harry Potter. Like the character himself, the name is at first blush wholly
ordinary – but when you look a little deeper you see that “Harry” is short for “Harold”, which is
a homonym for ‘Herald’, and “Potter” might, to an English Literature undergraduate, evoke the
Biblical image of the potter’s field, a burial ground for the villainous or the poverty-stricken…
Like I said, it’s a stretch.
Harry Potter is not without its faults on this front, however. In April 2013 the writer, multimedia
artist, educator and Fulbright grantee Rachel Rostad took Rowling to task in her College Unions
Poetry Slam Invitational performance piece “To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang”:
When you put me in your books, millions of Asian girls across America rejoiced!
Finally, a potential Halloween costume that wasn't a geisha or Mulan! What’s not
to love about me? I’m everyone’s favorite character! I totally get to fight tons of
Death Eaters and have a great sense of humor and am full of complex emotions!
Oh wait. That’s the version of Harry Potter where I’m not fucking worthless.
First of all, you put me in Ravenclaw. Of course the only Asian at Hogwarts
would be in the nerdy house. Too bad there wasn't a house that specialized in
computers and math and karate, huh?
I know, you thought you were being tolerant.
Between me, Dean, and the Indian twins, Hogwarts has like...five brown people?
It doesn't matter we’re all minor characters. Nah, you’re not racist!
Just like how you’re not homophobic, because Dumbledore’s totally gay!
Of course it’s never said in the books, but man. Hasn't society come so far?
Now gays don’t just have to be closeted in real life — they can even be closeted
fictionally!
Ms. Rowling. Let’s talk about my name. Cho. Chang.
Cho and Chang are both last names. They are both Korean last names.
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I am supposed to be Chinese.
Me being named “Cho Chang” is like a Frenchman being named “Garcia
Sanchez.”
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As Diana Lee points out, “You can hear [Rostad’s] frustration with the fact that Asians and
Asian women in the U.S. are constantly misrepresented in shallow and/or stereotypical roles in
books, movies, and television shows. You follow along as she exposes the subtle but sadly
pervasive ways these caricatures are presented – with ‘Asian’ accented English, with ‘foreign’
names that may or may not make sense in actual ‘Asian’ languages, as disposable minor
characters used to set up the focus on the White, leading woman who is the ‘real’ love interest, as
sexually ‘exotic’ Asian women who are submissive and/or hypersexualized, and only to be used
and then discarded or left behind.”
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The piece was powerful, but things are rarely so simple. Several days after the YouTube video of
Rostad’s performance went viral, Rostad posted a follow-up video to “point by point, articulately,
sincerely, and calmly” respond to five recurring points of criticism she had received. According
to Lee, “One point addressed the possibility that ‘Cho Chang’ could be a legitimate name,
despite what she articulated in her poem about ‘Cho’ and ‘Chang’ being two last names. Rachel
admitted ignorance in Chinese and other naming practices, acknowledged that the line in the
poem about Cho’s name was problematic, apologized for marginalizing and misrepresenting
parts of a community she was trying to empower, and urged viewers to also focus on the other
themes she draws on in the rest of the poem.”
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A less problematic name is that of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them protagonist
Newt Scamander, which is so obviously like the animalistic “Newt Salamander” that it’s almost
Voldemort-ian in its on-the-noseness. It’s a great name for a Hufflepuff zoologist, and it’s also a
great name for a wholly unlikely hero. It’s also perfectly brandable in its out-there-ness. Perhaps
the over-the-top ‘Luke Skywalker’ approach is a better way to go.

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Rostad 2013.
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Lee 2013.
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Lee 2013.
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Look and Silhouette
A great test for how well a character might translate across multiple media is to see how well
said character can be caricatured. An occasional challenge for TV shows is that subtle
differences in actors’ appearances must be greatly amplified when they’re being translated into
other, lower-resolution media. Consider how the characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer were
caricatured when they made the leap to comics, and in the designs fro a (never realized) cartoon
series:

As with all caricature, certain aspects of the characters’ outfits and mannerisms are amplified –
but, especially in comics or animation, silhouette design is key because it can differentiate and
identify characters even in extremely rough renditions. A great silhouette can convey a sizable
amount of information about the character – their bulk and stance tell a lot about a character’s
attitude. A brilliant silhouette design makes a character instantly identifiable. For example,
who’s this?
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The hat, whip and pose all make this instantly identifiable as Indiana Jones:

By contrast, a weaker silhouette design translates into a weaker, less identifiable character.
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This particular silhouette is not very unique. The haircut, gun and stance could be a character
from GI Joe, David Boreanaz in Seal Team, Wilmer Valderrama in NCIS…

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As it turns out, the silhouette belongs to Nathan Drake from Naughty Dog’s Uncharted. Drake
has a few touches that have come to be associated with the character – most notably the half-
tucked shirt – but even these aren’t very unique. Consider these side-by-side:

Rick O’Donnell’s high-waisted pants and tall boots from the Mummy movies has more period
flair, but the overall character design – right down to the blue scarf! – is astonishingly similar.
Caricaturing either of these characters to a simplistic rendering for comics or animation would
result in a fairly generic character design.
By contrast, consider one of the greatest, most extensible character designs of all time:
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Darth Vader has an instantly recognizable silhouette with the samurai-style helmet and long cape,
never mind the lightsaber.

Beyond that, however, Vader’s character design has a number of other elements that make him
instantly recognizable across all media. For example, Vader’s signature sound.

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Sound
Truly great character designs don’t rely purely on differentiated visuals, they also have
recognizable sounds. For Darth Vader, this was a mix of James Earl Jones’ deep, rumbling voice
and the trademark labored, almost robotic breathing. This was echoed years later in the sound
design for the coughing cyborg General Grievous, but the iconic hahhh-shhhh, hahhh-shhhh of
Vader’s breathing apparatus is recognizable in any medium.
This is a crucial point – that truly great character designs translate into all media, including those
without any screens at all. Sound design is crucial when making the jump to purely audio media
like radio dramas, audiobooks or podcasts. This can take the form of such sounds as Vader’s
breathing or the fwoosh of an igniting lightsaber, but it can also be a particular bit of music
associated with a given character. The musical themes that John Williams created for Darth
Vader, Princess Leia, or Indiana Jones will always and forever evoke those characters. The same
goes for Monty Norman’s iconic theme for James Bond. No matter who’s playing Bond, as soon
as that theme song plays, the audience knows exactly who that actor is supposed to be.
Bond also embodies a second element of aural character design: the catchphrase. From “Bond.
James Bond” to “shaken, not stirred”, Bond has a number of particular catchphrases that serve as
shorthand for the rest of the character. Other character catchphrases range from the “With great
power comes great responsibility” wisdom that Spider-Man/Peter Parker learned from his Uncle
Ben, “Hulk smash!” for the Incredible Hulk, or the “It’s clobberin’ time!” that the Thing from
the Fantastic Four would yell during every fight.
Bizarrely, this also applies the most powerfully in a silent medium. Catchphrases are prevalent in
comics for much the same reason as they are for James Bond. Just as Bond came to be played by
a string of actors over the decades, so too are superheroes drawn by an endless string of artists
across multiple books. Their silhouettes and costumes are designed to be relatively simple and
broadly differentiated so they’re recognizable no matter who draws them, but their catchphrases
also serve much the same function. So too do iconic sound effects that are associated with
particular characters. Fans of the X-Men comics were ecstatic when Nightcrawler first made it to
the big screen, because we could finally learn what bamf, the nonsense sound effect that had long
appeared in comic panels whenever Nightcrawler used his superpower of teleportation, actually
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sounded like. The same went for snikt, the trademark sound made whenever Wolverine’s claws
popped out of his hands. Snikt was such an iconic aural characteristic for the character that it has
come to serve as a shorthand for Wolverine in all kinds of ways, including a Wolverine comic
just called Snikt!

Gestures and Trademark Actions
Wolverine popping his claws is also an example of iconic gestures and trademark actions. No
matter what (visual) medium Wolverine appears in, the action of his claws emerging from his
hands is a big part of what makes Wolverine, well, Wolverine.
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This aspect of transmedia character design is particularly important for Playgrounders, to return
to the earlier “Multiple Audiences and Leveraged Engagement” chapter. Designing characters
with particular characteristics that people can pretend to have also frequently includes particular
gestures that accompany those actions.

Further evidence that Darth Vader has one of the greatest transmedia character designs of all
time: a Star Wars fan can “force choke” another fan from across a room, and both of them will
instantly know what’s being evoked with the simple action of holding one’s thumb and
forefinger a specific distance apart.
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Whether it’s Indiana Jones cracking his whip or Sherlock Holmes peering through a magnifying
glass, the trick is to give your characters certain things to do that can evoke those characters at a
glance.

Embodied Mysteries
Creating characters with easily recognizable, even caricature-able, looks, silhouettes, sounds and
gestures reduces the inherent friction in having those characters appear across multiple media. Is
it possible to design characters that will make audiences more excited to invest their time and
money in overcoming that transmedia resistance as well?
Absolutely. The key to this is designing characters with embedded mysteries.
Every character has some degree of embedded mystery. As a character’s story unfolds over time,
we are frequently treated to their backstories, characters from their histories, and so on. This is
especially prevalent in comics, where the “secret origin of X!” is such a well-established trope
that the telling and re-telling and re-re-retelling of a character’s origin story becomes something
of a tradition in every new reimagining. This is so much of a tradition, in fact, that 2017’s
Spider-Man: Homecoming earned headlines by opting out of it (io9’s Germain Lussier even
titled his review “Spider-Man: Homecoming Proves How Good Skipping the Origin Story Can
Be”). Lussier 2017.
However, an even more powerful tool for generating audience engagement can be not just
skipping the retreading of well-worn origin stories, but not providing them at all. Over the years
Batman’s arch-nemesis the Joker has had a number of different, and sometimes directly
conflicting, origin stories. This became a strategic part of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the
character in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (“Do you want to know how I got these
scars?”) but is epitomized in Alan Moore’s classic and horrific The Killing Joke. There’s a
moment where we think we’re going to get a canonical answer to the Joker’s mysterious origin,
straight from the lips of the Clown Prince of Crime himself – but then, in perfect keeping with
the Joker’s character, he only says: “Something like that happened to me, you know. I… I’m not
exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I’m going
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to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha!” Moore 1988. As long as that secret
origin remains a secret, we bat-fans will sit up a little straighter every time a possible answer is
dangled in front of us.
Another way to do this is found in the visual design of the character itself. For example, when he
debuted in 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special, Boba Fett instantly became one of the most
enigmatic characters in the Star Wars universe. Part of his mystery was his colorful (and just
plain cool) armor. That helmet! That jetpack! Those… Wait – what are those things hanging
from his shoulder?

This wasn’t just some weird touch added by an overzealous animator. Those furry things
hanging from Fett’s right shoulder like a raccoon tail dangling from the antenna of a 1950s hot
rod were deliberate. In fact, they show up in pretty much every version of the character.
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So what are they? Even after the prequels answered the longstanding mystery behind who was
under Boba Fett’s helmet and where that strange armor came from, the furry decorations were
still largely a mystery.
However, as with much of Star Wars lore, the answer could be found with some judicious
digging into the Lucasfilm archives. Here, also as with so much of Star Wars lore, said answer
was related to the toys – here, in a quote sample from Kenner, the toy license-holder for the Star
Wars action figures back in the 1980s:
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Wookiee scalps. Those mysterious braided things on Boba Fett’s right shoulder are, in fact,
wookiee scalps – a nice bit of an embedded testament into how much of a badass Boba Fett
actually is, and an embedded story hook as well. Any Star Wars fan observant enough to wonder
about that strange added element to Boba Fett’s costume is probably also curious enough to want
to know where they came from – and would thus be willing to invest the required time or money
for any transmedia extension that answered that embodied mystery.

Legendary Character Artifacts
Finally, another useful tactic when designing characters for transmedia stories is to give them
instantly recognizable legendary character artifacts, or items that are associated exclusively with
that particular character. The more unique these are the better, like Indiana Jones’ hat or the
lightsaber Kylo Ren wields in The Force Awakens, with its (relatively) unique mini-lightsaber
crossguard. Both of these artifacts also have their own embedded stories as well – the story of
how Indiana Jones first received his fedora is told in the opening scenes of 1989’s Indiana Jones
and the Last Crusade, and hints about how Kylo Ren based his lightsaber on an ancient design
can be found in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Incredible Cross-Sections tie-in book. Other
examples of legendary character artifacts with embedded narratives include Buffy the Vampire
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Slayer’s scythe, or the lightsaber that passes from Anakin Skywalker to Luke and on to Rey – but
we’ll revisit those in greater detail in a few chapters.

Action: Evaluating Extensible Character Design
1. How do the characters’ decisions impact the flow of the story? Are they primarily
reacting to plot elements out of their control, or are they actively making
decisions that direct the plot? Is the story more character-driven or plot-driven
overall?
2. Does each character have an arc of their own in the main story, or an implied arc
outside the main story?
3. What classes of characters exist? What are the primary characteristics of each
class? What differentiates those classes from each other? How do those classes
interact with each other?
4. How do the designs of the main characters differ from one another? How are their
silhouettes different? How recognizable would that character be in another
medium, with the amount of detail reduced or increased?
5. What non-visual, key design elements are associated with each of the story’s
characters? Do they have iconic or trademark sound effects, catchphrases, actions
or gestures?
6. What embodied mysteries do each of the characters have? Are there elements of
their bodies or what they wear that hint at some additional story to be discovered?

Action: Creating Extensible Character Design
1. What character classes exist in your world, in keeping with its rules and unique
characteristics? Create at least three, and create organizations based on these
classes. (For example, the Jedi or the Sith.) Be sure to list their key characteristics
(what sets them apart from the others), any key visuals (colors), skills, artifacts,
etc. Enter these organizations into sections 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and so on in your NDD.
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2. Create specific characters to populate your Simple Story from last week. Give
them names, classes, alignments, and roles (multiple roles is better). Create a hero,
and put the hero into section 4.1 of your NDD. Create a simple story for them and
an arc, including what they've learned, as well as their background (including any
organizations they're in from above), personality, desires, abilities and
weaknesses, in keeping with the rules of your world. Put the simple story directly
after the character's name, and the other details in the appropriate sections. Note
any specific visual designs, audio designs, gestural designs, or legendary artifacts
associated with each character. Do the same for at least two villain/antagonists,
and enter them into section 5.1 and 5.2 of your NDD. Do the same for at least
three allies, and enter them into sections 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 of your NDD.
3. As you go, imagine what kind of "legendary artifacts" your characters or
organizations might have that are specific to their character type or class (e.g., red
lightsabers for the Sith) and/or have embedded stories attached to them. Add these
legendary artifacts into section 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3 of your NDD as appropriate.

Example: Extensible Character Design in Spookshow
The next step for developing Spookshow was to give greater depth to my protagonist, Casey
Smith, and to start to fill out her supporting cast and the other characters she would meet along
her journey.
Character Types: Alignment and Character Classes
I knew that I wanted Casey’s primary run-in with the Church to happen as a result of her going
to a Spookshow, and I’d had some idea of what kinds of magic would exist in this world, so it
was a short jump to figuring out that the Spookshow should have at least one magician from each
class of magic I’d started to sketch out: Necromancy, Biomancy, and Technomancy, with a hint
towards the possibility of Cryptomancy.
Alignment came later as I began to get a greater feeling for each character, but doing so helped
me ensure that not too many of my characters had the same general attitude or disposition.
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Names
I’d begun to have ideas about other characters, and this helped bring them into focus. The
Necromancer needed a delightfully spooky name, and after a while I landed on Sebastian Shade.
The Biomancer needed something similar, but as a nickname – Megan “Creepy” Jones. The
Technomancer’s name came into focus in a more roundabout way. I liked the alliteration of
“Sebastian Shade’s Spectacular Spookshow,” and I had an idea that I could do something similar
with the Technomancer. I liked ‘automatons’, which led to ‘amazing automatons,’ which then
led to my thinking about names that suggested intelligence, so ‘Alexandria’ but maybe shorter –
and ‘Alexandra’s Amazing Automatons’ popped into my head. However, I liked the idea that
she might be the inverse of the Biomancer – ‘Alexandra’ might be her real name instead of a
stage name, and she’d use a nickname among her friends. ‘Gears’ was my instant choice, and so
Alexandra ‘Gears’ Wright (as I’d already used ‘Smith’ for Casey, and I liked the evocation of a
blacksmith-type character) was born.
Other character names came eventually. ‘Father Jeremiah Stine’ just sounded like a judgmental,
sharp-edged villain. ‘Seth Jameson’ was a great Midwestern name, down to Earth without being
too backwoods. ‘Robin McCloud’ is, of course, a hat-tip to the fairy Puck’s alternate name Robin
Goodfellow and Scott McCloud, the comics theorist.
Ironically, “Casey Smith” is deliberately bland, because of how her parents are in hiding. Her
sister Molly, who I’d determined would be born in America, had an even more deliberately
nondescript American name. I’ll concede that this is a weak point and something to possibly
reconsider moving forward.
Look and Silhouette
Since I knew I wanted Spookshow to include visual media like comics and animation, I spent the
time on the characters’ visual designs and silhouettes. Since I also knew I didn’t intend to do
anything in live action first, I decided to start with the ‘reduced figuration,’ ‘lower-resolution’
caricatures first. This lent itself perfectly to the intended aesthetic that I described in “Unique
Storyworld Characteristics”. Casey’s design would be warm but boisterous; Shade’s would be
eerie and almost skeletal. Molly’s would be somewhat withdrawn in her girl form but – as I came
up with the idea that she would transform into a monster – the monster form would be much
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more, sure, monstrous, but also more gleeful. Seth would have a kind of eagerness about him, at
least at first.

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Sound, Gestures and Trademark Actions
As I write this, I’m still working on this. This will come more into focus as the stories get more
developed beat by beat, and the visuals develop for the comics and especially the animation.
Embodied Mysteries
There are some stories and mysteries designed into the characters themselves. Casey’s hat was
given to her by one of her stage heroes, and she’s designed the rest of her outfit around it. The
wand that passes from Shade to Casey has a huge embedded mystery in it, which I’ll revisit later
on.

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6. Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture
As mentioned above in ‘resonant simple-story myths’, simple-stories can be used as a
central architecture for a much bigger story. When the pattern of the simple-story is
repeated at a much greater scale, as in how Luke Skywalker’s character arc from the first
Star Wars movie is echoed at a greater scale across the first Star Wars trilogy, this is called
fractal storytelling. Fractal storytelling can help reduce transmedia resistance by
consciously or unconsciously providing a kind of signposting to keep audiences oriented as
to where they are in the story. This echoing of narrative patterns also reinforces the
audience expectations for what kind of story they will be experiencing in every component
(a practice in clear display in the repeated narrative patterns in many television
procedurals).
When a story is designed in such a way for these patterns to be repeated across multiple
subfranchises, it is said to have an extensible narrative architecture. Assassin’s Creed has a
very extensible narrative architecture because it features a series of stories set in different
periods of history, connected via a contemporary super-storyline. Doctor Who has an
similarly extensible narrative architecture, with the added feature of multiple
subfranchises built around multiple incarnations of the Doctor.
A storyworld’s architecture is also said to be extensible when it deliberately includes gaps
to be filled in or parts expanded by future stories or subfranchises. The strategic
introduction of such mysteries, gaps or other negative spaces reduces transmedia resistance
by piquing the curiosity of the audience, thus increasing the amount of energy they’re
willing to invest in answering those mysteries. For example, when Obi-Wan Kenobi tells
Luke Skywalker “I fought with your father in the Clone Wars” in the first Star Wars movie,
it’s not a big enough mystery to disrupt the flow of the story, but it’s enough of a mystery
to motivate audiences to explore the Clone Wars animated series years later.

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Fractal Storytelling
In 1975 the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractals to describe patterns that
recur across multiple scales. Consider the following:

That image is absolutely filled with triangles – an enormous triangle made up of three smaller
triangles (four if you count the negative-space one in the middle), and each of those smaller
triangles is made of up of three even smaller triangles (again, four if you count the negative-
space ones in their centers), each of which are in turn made up of three even smaller yet
triangles… You get the idea. Mandelbrot pointed out that this self-similarity is found across
nature – the pattern of the veins in a leaf is similar to the pattern in how the leaves sprout from
branches, which is similar to how branches sprout from the trunk of the tree, and so on.
Fractal-esque recurring patterns can be found in epic narratives as well, which we’ll call fractal
storytelling.

Case Study: Star Wars
Consider the Simple-Story from Star Wars we described a few chapters ago:
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Once there was a [restless farmboy] who, more than anything, wanted [to see the
world and fight back against the evil ruler] until one day [the rebels come to the
hero's home].
Unfortunately, [the evil ruler] wanted [to destroy its enemies and rule everyone
forever].
So, under the guidance of [an elderly warrior] and with the help of [a charming
rogue], [a giant beast], and [two jesters], they set out to [rescue the kidnapped
princess].
But then, they discover that [the villain is about to become unstoppable].
So, they set out to [stop the villain's plan] until finally they [destroy the villain's
stronghold] and [save the world]!
Now, consider this: this same story pattern applies to both Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
and the original Star Wars trilogy (Episode IV-VI). This is even echoes in the recurring images
throughout the original trilogy, most explicitly in the destruction of a Death Star at the end of
both the first film and the first trilogy. The first trilogy is a fractal expansion of the story in the
first film.

The Death Star-esque superweapon Starkiller Base in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force
Awakens was more than J.J. Abrams paying homage to the original trilogy. Its inclusion (and its
scaling-up from a moon-sized superweapon to the size of a planet), Abrams was deliberately and
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explicitly making The Force Awakens into a fractal expansion of the story in ways that, at first
blush, the prequel trilogy was not.
Or was it? In the original trilogy, a shadowy villain is also building a superweapon to use against
our heroes, just at a smaller scale. In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, the heroic Qui-
Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi are astonished to come up against a new secret weapon of the
Sith: Darth Maul. They defeat Maul, but by the end of the third prequel Obi-Wan must face
down a much more powerful, even more horrific version: Anakin Skywalker, who would (of
course) become Darth Vader. Further, the shadowy villain is developing a second superweapon
over the original trilogy: the clone army that takes out the Jedi.
As of this writing, it’s too early to tell where J.J. Abrams will go with his Episode IX conclusion
to the ‘Skywalker saga’, but if pattern recognition and this notion of fractal storytelling holds
true, then it should be something spectacular.

Case Study: The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings
We see similar fractal expansions, or fractal reflections, across many other pop-culture epics.
The story of The Hobbit, at its most basic, is fractally expanded into the story of The Lord of the
Rings:
Once there was a [quiet man] who, more than anything, wanted [to be left alone]
until one day [he discovered a special object].
Unfortunately, [an ancient evil] wanted [the special object].
So, under the guidance of [a great wizard] and with the help of [a deposed ruler],
[the hero’s best friend], and [two rival warriors], they set out to [stop the ancient
evil].
But then, they discover that [the special object is cursed, and is killing the hero].
So, they set out to [destroy the special object] until finally they [destroy it and
render the ancient evil powerless] and [restore the rightful ruler of the land]!
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Some things change, it’s true – The Hobbit’s ‘quiet man’ reluctant hero Bilbo Baggins’ best
friend doesn’t accompany him the way Samwise Gamgee accompanies The Lord of the Rings’
‘quiet man’ reluctant hero Frodo Baggins, and Legolas and Gimli’s role of the ‘two rival
warriors’ is played by an absolute preponderance of dwarves in The Hobbit – but some of the
similarities are astonishing. The deposed ruler in The Hobbit is Thorin, and the deposed ruler in
The Lord of the Rings is Aragorn. The ancient evil in The Hobbit is Smaug the dragon, and in
The Lord of the Rings the ancient evil is Sauron. The great wizard in The Hobbit is Gandalf, and
the great wizard in The Lord of the Rings is, well, Gandalf – but that only proves my point.

Sidebar: a Disclaimer
Note: a well-developed transmedia storyworld can support an almost infinite number of stories
of multiple types, as long as those stories are in keeping with the storyworld’s unique
characteristics. Stories like Joe Schrieber’s ‘zombies in Star Wars’ novel Death Troopers
demonstrate this to be true. However, the tentpole stories of successful storyworlds tend to
exhibit this recurring fractal story pattern.

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Simple-Stories, Super-Stories and Themes
This kind of fractal storytelling reflects another key characteristic of vast transmedia
storyworlds: they consist of single, individual simple-stories that build up to larger stories
(sometimes as subfranchises), which then build up to the macro-story of the world itself,
something George R. R. Martin refers to as the ‘overplot’ of the Wild Cards shared universe
stories.
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This is the most explicit in serialized, multi-season TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Case Study: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Consider Buffy’s simple-story, as we outlined earlier:
Once there was a [normal girl] who, more than anything, wanted [a normal life]
until one day [she discovered her secret destiny].
Unfortunately, [monsters] wanted [to kill her and all her friends].
So, under the guidance of [a wise scholar] and with the help of [a genius], [a good
monster], and [a jester], they set out to [kill the monsters].
But then, they discover that [there is an even bigger monster pulling the strings].

125
Martin 2007, p. 21.
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So, they set out to [find the ultimate monster] until finally they [kill the ultimate
monster] and [return victorious to a (mostly) normal life]!
A version of that story unfolds again and again, over and over, in almost every individual
episode of every season. All the episodes of the season then add up to a version of this story
retold at the season level, with the latter episodes of the season building up to a major
confrontation between our heroes and that season’s “big bad” (a term the show itself uses in an
acknowledgement of this pattern recurring in their own lives). Every season of the show then
adds up to a super-story of Buffy’s life, fighting bigger and bigger monsters at the same time as
she’s fighting bigger and bigger battles of becoming an adult (which, of course, most of the
monsters on the show are thinly-veiled metaphors for anyway). This recurring metaphor
resonates with the show’s central theme: that our idea of an ideal life is usually even more of a
fiction than vampires and other monsters. Instead we are confronted with a series of monsters,
betrayals, heartbreaks, departures, and sudden deaths – but within ourselves we find more
strength than we had thought possible, and we also find help from our closest friends (including
ones from extremely unexpected places).
This is not only the theme of Buffy’s story, but also the theme of Buffy’s storyworld. The same
message resonates across the multiple transmedia spinoffs that Buffy generated. Angel was the
most famous of these, as the vampire with a soul struggled to find a way to atone for his past sins
but was only able to do so with the help of some (occasionally very unlikely) friends. Later in
comics the Buffyverse expanded again with a story about a slayer in the far-flung future called
Fray (2001-2003), and in time additional spinoff comic series were given to most of Buffy’s
closest associates, including Angel & Faith (2011-2013), Spike: A Dark Place (2012-2013),
Willow: Wonderland (2012-2013) and Giles (2018).
Although the exact details of the simple-story are not perfectly replicated across every series,
much as in the earlier examples of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, enough recurring
tropes, major story elements and most importantly themes recur across the Buffyverse for them
to be fractally recognizable as components of a single storyworld.
So what happens when disparate parts of a storyworld attempt to tackle radically different
themes?
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Case Study: Star Trek
Star Trek is a perfect example of how a franchise’s central theme can change over the years. In
Gene Roddenberry’s original “Wagon Train in space” incarnation, Star Trek used the human
drive to explore the unknown as the central theme – and as the central narrative engine that
provided the opportunity for a seemingly endless array of stories. The show could do a story with
a political angle one week, a more action-centered angle the next week, and an interpersonal
drama the week after that, depending on the planet and culture that the Enterprise encountered
each week. That remained steady for most of the show’s spinoffs; it held true for Star Trek: The
Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. There was some variation in the
theme for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is to be expected for a show that was built around
a space station instead of a starship, but the presence of a stable wormhole near the space station
meant that a wide array of cultures could come to them instead of the other way around. Still,
Deep Space Nine had a much deeper theme of political intrigue and intercultural conflict than
one of exploration; in this way, it had more in common with Babylon 5 than most of the rest of
the Star Trek franchise.
A more pronounced thematic shift came with J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek… Well, not exactly
reboot, per se, but – thanks to an extremely clever bit of science fiction time travel sleight of
hand – continuity forking. Abrams’ take had an older version of Mr. Spock from the Star Trek
universe fans had known and loved for decades be blamed for a scientific accident that destroyed
the villains’ home planet of Romulus, and then both Spock and the villains were thrown back in
time so the Romulans could save their planet and blow up Spock’s home planet of Vulcan
instead. As a result, a new timeline was created, and it’s this alternate “Kelvin timeline” (named
after the USS Kelvin, the first ship the Romulan villains attacked when they jumped back in time)
where Abrams’ Star Trek and its sequels Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) and Star Trek: Beyond
(2016) were set.
Like I said, it was an extremely clever bit of narrative sleight of hand, but it also included a
disturbing shift in the franchise’s central theme. Although action-adventure had long been a key
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element of the franchise’s makeup as well, especially in its feature films including the Next
Generation pre-reboot movies Generations (1994), First Contact (1996), Insurrection (1998)
and Nemesis (2002), the ‘Abramsverse’ seemed to focus exclusively on the action-adventure
element at the cost of the exploration theme. If the theme for the Star Trek storyworld pre-
Abrams had been “explore the universe!”, the theme post-Abrams seemed to be “blow it up!”.
This seemed like a strategic move on Paramount’s part to make Star Trek more palatable to
younger audiences, but instead it seemed primarily to annoy and alienate longtime fans of the
franchise.
This darker theme seemed to be cemented when Star Trek returned to TV (well, streaming
media) in 2017 with Star Trek: Discovery. Despite the title and the oft-trumpeted marketing
tagline “Boldly Go,” by the midway point of Discovery’s first season the show had done little
actual exploration and much, much more blowing stuff up. The titular USS Discovery is an
experimental ship with a cutting edge “spore drive” that enables it to teleport instantly to
virtually anywhere it wants, but instead of venturing into unknown galaxies the Discovery
instead serves as the Federation’s secret weapon in a war against the Klingons.
As I write this, it’s the holiday hiatus between the two halves of Discovery’s first season, so
there’s every chance that it might course-correct and move to a more exploratory theme moving
forward – but even so, it’s an interesting case study in identifying (or not) the unique storyworld
characteristics and audience motivations, and the role theme plays in calculating a franchise’s
future moving forward.
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Case Study: Star Wars
Let’s take a look at how simple-stories, super-stories and themes play out in Star Wars.

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Another key case study on tone could be done on Stargate: SG-1 and its spinoffs Stargate: Atlantis
and Stargate: Universe. Both Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis shared a tone of action-adventure
with strong doses of wonder and humor. Stargate: Universe seemingly attempted to co-opt the then-
popularity of Ronald Moore’s gritty reboot of Battlestar Galactica, bypassing humor for a much darker,
bleaker tone. The fan reaction was a deafening, grumbling yawn. Whereas SG-1 ran for 10 seasons and
Atlantis for five, Universe was unceremoniously cancelled after only 2.
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We’ve already seen how the simple-story in Star Wars: A New Hope is fractally expanded out
into the story of the first Star Wars trilogy, and how it might also extend forward and backward
across all nine films in the ‘Skywalker saga’, with subfranchises being built around Anakin,
Luke and Rey.

Interestingly, there’s a kind of cascading, repeating story happening across the heroes of each
subfranchise. Anakin’s rise, fall and eventual redemption plays out in episodes I-VI. As of this
writing, it appears that Luke’s rise, fall and redemption may play out across episodes IV-IX. If
this “history repeating” motif continues, then it suggests that Rey’s rise, fall and eventual
redemption may play out over at least episodes VII-IX, and potentially on into another trilogy as
well. (Of course, if they follow previous patterns it’ll be 10-15 years after Episode X before we
see Episode XI, but time will tell.)
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This patterned model also reveals something interesting. A rise depicts a character’s elevation
above normal to superhuman, heroic status, a fall depicts a character’s crashing descent below
normal to subhuman, villainous status, and a redemption depicts at the very least a return to
normal, human status. In other words, it’s a restoration of balance. Much of Star Wars deals
with the clash between the Light Side and the Dark Side of the Force, and prophecies of someone
who will ‘bring balance to the Force’. Looking at these patterns, the consistent theme to Star
Wars seems to be finding that balance between the Light and Dark sides of the Force in all of us,
thus establishing a balance of the conflicting forces in us.

The Importance of Themes
Identifying your storyworld’s theme leads directly to a crucial moment of reflection: is the
narrative you’re designing a story worth telling?
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argues that the reason why so many
myths around the world follow the same structure with similar archetypes – the ‘monomyth’ – is
because they were universally lessons for how to progress through the stages of life:
The dangerous crises of self-development are permitted to come to pass under the
protecting eye of an experienced initiate in the lore and language of dreams, who
then enacts the role and character of the ancient mystagogue, or guide of souls,
the initiating medicine man of the primitive forest sanctuaries of trial and
initiation. The doctor is the modern master of the mythological realm, the knower
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of all the secret ways and words of potency. His role is precisely that of the Wise
Old Man of the myths and fairy tales whose words assist the hero through the
trials and terrors of the weird adventure. He is the one who appears and points to
the magic shining sword that will kill the dragon-terror, tells of the waiting bride
and the castle of many treasures, applies healing balm to the almost fatal wounds,
and finally dismisses the conqueror, back into the world of normal life, following
the great adventure into the enchanted night.
When we turn now, with this image in mind, to consider the numerous strange
rituals that have been reported from the primitive tribes and great civilizations of
the past, it becomes apparent that the purpose and actual effect of these was to
conduct people across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a
change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life. The so-
called rites of passage, which occupy such a prominent place in the life of a
primitive society (ceremonials of birth, naming, puberty, marriage, burial, etc.)
are distinguished by formal, and usually very severe, exercises of severance,
whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life
patterns of the stage being left behind. Then follows an interval of more or less
extended retirement, during which are enacted rituals designed to introduce the
life adventurer to the forms and proper feelings of his new estate, so that when, at
last, the time has ripened for the return to the normal world, the initiate will be as
good as reborn.
[…] It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the
symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other
constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back.
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This culture- and generation-guiding power is why we as storytellers need to be mindful of what
stories we contribute to the culture. In From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner describes
fairy tales as serving a similar guiding purpose:

127
Campbell 1972, pp. 9-12.
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On the whole fairy tales are not passive or active; their mood is optative –
announcing what might be. Imagining the fate that lies ahead and ways of dealing
with it (if adverse – as in “Hansel and Gretel” and “Donkeyskin”), or achieving it
(if favorable – as in “Puss in Boots”), is the stuff of Mother Goose tales. The
genre is characterized by “heroic optimism”, as if to say, “one day, we might be
happy, even if it won’t last.”
The prodigies are introduced to serve this concealed but ever-present
visionariness of the tale, and serve it well by disguising the stories’ harshly
realistic core: the magic entertainment helps the story look like a mere bubble of
nonsense from the superstitious mind of ordinary, negligible folk. The
enchantments also universalize the narrative setting, encipher concerns, beliefs
and desires in brilliant, seductive images that are themselves a form of
camouflage, making it possible to utter harsh truths, to say what you dare. The
disregard for logic, all those fairytale non-sequiturs and improbable reversals,
rarely encompasses the emotional conflicts themselves: hatred, jealousy, kindness,
cherishing retain an intense integrity throughout. The double vision of the tales,
on the one hand charting perennial drives and terrors, both conscious and
unconscious, and on the other mapping actual, volatile experience, gives the genre
its fascination and power to satisfy. At the same time, uncovering the context of
the tales, their relation to society and history, can yield more of a happy resolution
than the story itself delivers with its challenge to fate: “They lived happily ever
after” consoles us, but gives scant help compared to “Listen, this is how it was
before, but things could change – and they might.”
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In Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism, Dan
Hassler-Forest explores the power, responsibility and opportunity storytellers, especially those
working in pop culture/mass media, have in influencing the future of an increasingly global
culture:

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Warner 1995, pp. xx-xxi.
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The benefit of the 'mainstreaming' of genre fiction and fan culture is that a much
larger audience now engages with fantastic storyworlds that can help question,
challenge, and perhaps even change the world we live in. If it is indeed the case,
as Fredric Jameson has famously suggested, that it has become easier for us to
imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, then we desperately need
fictions that not only offer possible alternatives but also involve us as active
participants in their construction. This combination of audience participation and
the creative development of imaginary storyworlds is what I describe as the
political potential of transmedia world-building in [science fiction] and fantasy. If
one is willing to embrace the notion that transmedia world-building involves not
only the audience's creative transformations of commercial entertainment
properties but also the active development of alternate imaginary worlds, its
political potential becomes impossible to ignore.
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As I touched on in the last chapter, Jeff Gomez argues that the world has evolved past the Hero’s
Journey model, and our continued insistence of using it as a baseline model for most pop culture
narratives is doing our global culture a massive disservice. Instead, Gomez advocates a new
narrative modality he calls the Collective Journey:
The shift to Collective Journey from a storytelling standpoint can be boiled down
to the distinction between causal narrative, where actions and reactions are
designed and depicted in a linear fashion, to a systemic narrative, where actions
radiate from the character(s) out into the story world, subtly or overtly impacting
many aspects of that world, including a network of other characters who have rich
perspectives and valid lives all their own. The storyteller must chart and track the
story world as a complex living, breathing system, always keeping in mind that
the audience in this digital world will be scrutinizing the narrative, dialoging
between themselves and with the narrative, even somehow participating within
and altering the narrative.

129
Hassler-Forest 2016, p. 6.
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We are seeing Collective Journey show up in entertainment narratives as well.
The vast story worlds of Star Wars (Disney), the Marvel Cinematic Universe
(Disney), and Harry Potter (Warner Bros.) all allow for audience participation,
each yielding hundreds of hours of user-generated content each year. Game of
Thrones (HBO), Orange is the New Black (Netflix), and The Walking Dead
(AMC) all forgo heroes, instead depicting chaotic worlds where dozens of
characters voice multiple perspectives and grapple within deeply flawed systems.
In all cases, if chaos is allowed to persist, tremendous outside forces threaten to
destroy them all. We are now starting to see stories such as Godless (Netflix) and
Arrival (Paramount), where genre tropes are reexamined through Collective
Journey sensibilities. In all of these cases, the solution is not derived by the
standard heroic cycle of mentors, trials, and transformation. Instead, positive
resolutions are the result of the juxtaposition of disparate ideas and perspectives
contributed by characters major and minor, somehow yielding a solution that is
altogether new.
In the Hero’s Journey, the community is reliant on the hero. If he fails, the
community is threatened or can be destroyed. In the absence of the hero, the
community will often elect someone who seems heroic, but may be dangerously
flawed. Collective Journey posits that no one is coming to save us. The
community must activate itself. Some will rise to become prominent in the story’s
telling, some will die or decline from the challenge, but all of us are valid, and
any one of us can offer a contribution that locks the solution in place.
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In short, stories – especially myths, legends, and pop culture entertainment – help cultures to not
just understand what happened or what could have happened, but what should happen. Henry
Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Liana Gamber-Thompson refer to this
concept as the ‘Civic Imagination,’ which Jenkins summarizes as follows:

130
Email conversation with Jeff Gomez, 3/19/2018.

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Around the world, activists are struggling for immigrant rights, battling rape
culture, questioning the police state, asking for homes for Syrian refuges, or
condemning wealth inequality while deploying iconography and mythology
borrowed from the American superhero tradition. Before we can change the
world, we need to be able to imagine what a better world might look like, we need
to believe that change is possible, we need to see ourselves as agents of change,
and we need to develop empathy for the plight of others whose experiences are
different from our own. The Civic Imagination refers to the often shared mental
constructs and rhetorical devices through which we inspire these potentials for
social and political change.
Recent research on participatory politics in the United States suggests that more
and more the Civic Imagination is being fueled by popular culture, especially
among youth, and we have begun to see such patterns elsewhere around the
world. There is a blurring of the lines between fans and activists as characters
from popular culture are being reimagined, redrawn, and re-performed to speak
for non-dominant peoples who often want contemporary heroic narratives they
can pass along to their own children and help them imagine a different role for
themselves as political and civic agents.
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As we craft our stories, we must be mindful of what core themes are serving as their underlying
architecture. Does the world you’re building communicate lessons that you want future
generations to incorporate into their core beliefs and worldview? If all stories are a form of
propaganda, does your storyworld teach a lesson that you want to pass on? As Terry Pratchett
wrote in A Hat Full of Sky, "There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up
every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world."

131
Jenkins 2017.
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Extensible Narrative Architecture
Star Wars is another brilliant example of extensible narrative architecture, a franchise-level
story structure designed to support multiple sub-franchises through elegant planning.
Earlier I described characters in transmedia storyworlds as needing to be extensible, or
extendable. In character design, extensibility means the character’s ability to be recognizably
extended across multiple media. In this chapter we’re looking at extensibility as the story’s
ability to be extended to include numerous additional components.
One key to this is a well-designed narrative architecture. Much like how ‘normal’ architecture is
a plan for how multiple rooms will fit together into a single larger building, narrative architecture
is the underlying structure of how multiple stories will fit together into a single larger story.
Remember the earlier chapter on simple-stories and super-stories? A single simple-story might
be built around, for example, a single character on a hero’s journey and the characters she meets
along the way. In corporate, Hollywood terms, a hero with a really successful simple-story can
support additional simple-stories, or sequels. This approach of creating a series of simple-stories
around such a character is, in essence, building a franchise around that character. Those simple-
stories can build up to a super-story around the character.
The super-story of a storyworld, by contrast, supports multiple simple-stories and even super-
stories about multiple heroes, who may well appear in (or “cross over into”) each other’s stories.
These super-stories around characters are, again in Hollywood terms, sub-franchises within the
larger franchise of the storyworld. Which brings us back to Star Wars.

Case Study: Star Wars
Consider the franchise model we sketched out before:

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Seeing Episode I-Episode III as a sub-franchise built around Anakin, Episode IV-Episode VI as a
sub-franchise built around Luke, and Episode VII-Episode IX as a sub-franchise built around Rey
isn’t difficult.
However, Star Wars also made a very shrewd move by placing these stories into a much larger
storyworld, and putting a significant amount of time in between each episode. By this I don’t
mean the amount of real-world time that passed between each film’s release, but the amount of
time that passes between most of the films. (Episode VII and Episode VIII are a noted exception
here.) This extra space
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and time built into the storyworld permits its larger super-story to
support a wide array of additional stories to be added – in other words, this narrative architecture
permits Star Wars to be highly extensible.
Consider the following additions:

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All puns intended.
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The time jump between the end of Episode II and the beginning of Episode III is significant –
Episode II ends with the beginning of the Clone Wars, and Episode III is the story of how the
Clone Wars end. The vast bulk of the Clone Wars isn’t shown in the live-action feature films.
Instead, those stories are told in Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars 2-D animated ‘micro-series’
(2003-2005), the Clone Wars CGI animated film (2008) and the Clone Wars CGI animated
series (2008-2015).
The time jump between the end of Episode III and the beginning of Episode IV is also significant.
Episode III ends with only the barest glimmers of hope for a rebellion as Luke and Leia are taken
into hiding by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Senator Bail Organa, and Yoda goes into self-imposed exile
on Dagobah. By the beginning of Episode IV a rebellion is more or less in full swing, although
it’s still a long way from winning. Exactly how that rebellion gets going is strategically left
untold. Instead, that story gets told years later in the CGI animated series Rebels (2014-2017)
and the first “Star Wars story” standalone film Rogue One (2016). This gap of time also allows
for the addition of “origin stories” for other popular characters such as the standalone film Han
Solo (2018).
Further, these are only the extensions in film and television. A mountain of other stories have
also been told in books, comics, and video games that slot into those empty spaces as well. The
video game Knights of the Old Republic is set in the storyworld’s ancient past, and Timothy
Zhan’s very popular “Thrawn trilogy” of novels (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising and The
Last Command) was set five years after the end of Episode VI. Lucasfilm’s 1996 transmedia
Shadows of the Empire project was set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi,
and tested the boundaries of what could be considered a Star Wars expansion without a feature
film or TV show – including a novel by Steve Perry, a video game from LucasArts for the
Nintendo 64 and Windows, comics from Dark Horse, and even a soundtrack and action figures.
(We'll revisit Shadows of the Empire in the later chapter on Additive Comprehension.) The
period between Episode VI and Episode VII seems to be primed for the next major expansion, as
Disney has already made a significant amount of hay out of the backstories for such new
characters as Poe Dameron and Captain Phasma, and, after they’re first addressed on the big
screen, the mysteries of Rey, Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker are almost certain to be next.
Disney’s strategic building-out of the gaps between Episode VI and Episode VII and between
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Episode VII and Episode VIII has also been more explicit than ever, labeling the covers of certain
extensions such as Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy of novels as part of a “The Journey to Star
Wars: The Force Awakens” campaign, and other extensions including Delilah S. Dawson’s
Captain Phasma novel as part of a “The Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi” campaign.
All of this demonstrates how, to date, the ‘spine’ of the Star Wars universe has been ‘the
Skywalker saga’, with room for additional non-Skywalker components (e.g., Han Solo: A Star
Wars Story, Rogue One, Captain Phasma, Rebels, Knights of the Old Republic) to be bolted on –
but these non-Skywalker extensions don’t necessarily feel like they have the same weight as the
Skywalker components, as evidenced by their not being considered episodes in the main Star
Wars story. Luke didn’t even speak in The Force Awakens, but the new protagonist Rey’s story
was all about finding Luke. In late 2017 it was announced that The Last Jedi director Rian
Johnson had been tasked with developing a new trilogy of Star Wars films that aren’t part of the
Skywalker saga, which will test how well Lucasfilm and Disney can, if you’ll pardon the
macabre metaphor, perform a spine transplant to prolong the life of their multi-billion-dollar
franchise.
Such an operation isn’t without precedent. Star Trek: The Next Generation proved that it can be
done, by creating a deliberate extension of the storyworld’s narrative architecture to support it.
As described earlier, the multiple periods of time in the Star Trek storyworld support sub-
franchises for The Next Generation, Enterprise, and Discovery, the vast breadth of the
storyworld’s physical space supported sub-franchises for Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and the
aforementioned narrative gymnastics of JJ Abrams and his crew used time travel and alternative
timelines to support a sub-franchise for the ‘Kelvin timeline’ feature films.
However, a more interesting case study is an example of a breathtakingly elegant narrative
architecture gone off the rails: Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed.

Case Study: Assassin’s Creed
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed is one of my all-time favorite examples of beautiful narrative
architecture. The central ‘tentpole’ experience of Assassin’s Creed is a series of high-budget,
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high-profile console video games that feature a mix of action-adventure, platforming and open
world game mechanics.

The first Assassin’s Creed introduces players to a bike messenger named Desmond who is
kidnapped by a shadowy organization named Abstergo Industries and strapped into a high-tech
machine named the Animus. Using the Animus, the villains force our hero to relive memories of
Desmond’s assassin ancestors that are encoded in his DNA, thus using Desmond to find a
magical MacGuffin that was hidden from them by the assassins generations ago. Soon Desmond
learns that Abstergo is the modern-day façade for the Templars (as in the Knights Templar), and
he is just the latest victim in a war between the Templars and the Assassins that has spanned
centuries. Over the course of Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed II:
Brotherhood, Assassin’s Creed II: Revelations, and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Desmond
escapes his captors, joins the modern-day Assassins, and finds out the spectacular, supernatural
truth about this secret war and his own lineage.
It’s a pretty good story in its own right, but Ubisoft’s truly elegant move was to have Desmond
(and by extension the player) relive the lives of different ancestors in different time periods
across multiple games. In the first game, Desmond relives the life of Altair, an assassin in
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Crusades-era Jerusalem. In Assassin’s Creed II (and its sequels Brotherhood and Revelations)
Desmond flashes back into the life of Ezio, an assassin in Renaissance-era Italy.
Using this structure, Ubisoft set up transmedia sub-franchises around both Altair and Ezio
beneath the linking super-story of Desmond. Prequels and sequels in mobile games, books,
comics and videos extended the stories of Altair and Ezio, and even after an audience member
had completed the Assassin’s Creed II sub-franchise trilogy, they were lured back for Assassin’s
Creed III to find out what happened next in the super-story of Desmond and the next assassin,
Connor.
Unfortunately, the end of Assassin’s Creed III was where things got a bit wobbly. When
Assassin’s Creed III was released, fans were prepared to expect something like this:

The transmedia sub-franchise for Assassin’s Creed I included (among other things) the main
Assassin’s Creed console title and the mobile games Assassin’s Creed: Altair Chronicles and
Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, which bridged the narrative gap between Assassin’s Creed I and
Assassin’s Creed II. This sub-franchise followed The sub-franchise for Assassin’s Creed II
included (again, among other things) the console titles Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed II:
Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Given the sub-trilogy for Assassin’s Creed II,
which continued Desmond’s story and Ezio’s story across all three parts, fans were primed to
expect another sub-trilogy continuing Desmond’s story and newcomer Connor’s story across
another three parts.
Nope. Instead, at the end of Assassin’s Creed III (spoilers!) Desmond… Died. Further, while the
next game in the series, the (originally) mobile game Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, did have a
cameo from Connor and was set in the same time period, it featured a new assassin protagonist
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named Aveline de Grandpré, who wasn’t even in Desmond’s bloodline – shattering the narrative
architecture of the series. Desmond wasn’t in it at all.

The next game after that, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, starred a different assassin
protagonist, Edward Kenway – grandfather to Assassin’s Creed III’s Connor. This also caused a
different kind of disruption in the pattern. While each game so far had made more progress
towards the present day, in a sense of mounting narrative tension as Desmond figured out the
mysteries of what happened between Altair’s day and his own, Assassin’s Creed IV leaped back
to a period between Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed III. Instead of playing a new
modern-day hero to replace Desmond, the player instead adopted the role of an unnamed
research analyst for Abstergo Industries.

Further complicating matters, the release of Assassin’s Creed IV was accompanied by a second
game, Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, which happened in the same general time period but from the
perspective of Shay, an assassin that had turned traitor and was now working with the Templars.
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This is pretty much the point where you can see the franchise manager for Assassin’s Creed
throwing up their hands and giving up, as the next game in the series did away with any attempt
at a numbering structure and simply went with Assassin’s Creed: Unity. That said, at least Unity
returned to the previous pattern of moving forward in time, as it was set in the French Revolution
with a new assassin named Arno. Further, its meta-story picked up at a new point in time after
Desmond’s death with a new modern-day protagonist meeting up with Desmond’s friends Shaun
and Bishop, secondary characters from earlier in the games. However, much as in Black Flag,
this new character wasn’t a character at all – just a blank avatar for the player called the
“Initiate”.

The Initiate’s story continued in the next game in the series, what should have been Assassin’s
Creed VI but instead went with Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. This game was set in England
during the Industrial Revolution, and followed assassins Jacob and Evie Frye.
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Things seemed to be more or less back on track, pattern-wise – until they weren’t. Assassin’s
Creed skipped a year in its annual release pattern, and then returned in 2017 with Assassin’s
Creed: Origins, which leapt back to a point in time before everything else – ancient Egypt. The
modern-day story picked up after the events in Syndicate, but now with an all-new character
named Layla Hassan, a researcher for Abstergo who is, of course, recruited by the Assassins.

Much like the Skywalkers in Star Wars, the primary spine in the Assassin’s Creed franchise was
Desmond. The world was broad enough to support additional side-stories with other characters
like Aveline de Grandpré and a (spoiler alert!) Templar double agent named Daniel Cross, who
would appear in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Assassin’s Creed III and Assassin’s Creed:
Rogue, and then star in the graphic novel Assassin’s Creed: Subject Four. However, once
Desmond was removed from the story, a sizable percentage of the narrative momentum for the
present-day storyline disappeared with him.
From a narrative designer’s perspective, this is extremely bad, because instead of decreasing
transmedia resistance as the story continued, such resistance actually increased as audiences
were increasingly less invested in what happened next. Returning to our audience models, while
Playgrounders might have been delighted by the central gameplay and virtual locations for the
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flashback scenes as they grew more varied and polished over time, Mythologists were left by the
wayside as Ubisoft stripped out the narrative momentum and replaced characters we’d come to
know and love with a rotating cast of largely generic, faceless avatars. As a result, transmedia
storyworld of Assassin’s Creed has gone from a truly remarkable exemplar of elegant narrative
architecture to a largely uninteresting, overly repetitive and creatively stagnant bit of ongoing
mediocrity, useful only as a cautionary tale of what not to do with a blockbuster franchise.

Case Study: Doctor Who
Another example of outstanding character-centric transmedia architecture can be found in the
BBC’s Doctor Who, arguably one of the longest-running transmedia stories in existence. For 50
years, fans of the show (also known as “Whovians”) have been following the adventures of the
Doctor, the last of an alien race of near-immortal Time Lords that travel through time and space
using devices like the TARDIS, a time-space craft disguised as a British police call box.
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Doctor Who has adopted multiple clever transmedia architecture tactics during its long run, most
notably the conceit that the Doctor has the ability to regenerate into a completely new body when
he is close to death. This freed the BBC from being tethered to any one particular actor for the
Doctor; if an actor wished to leave the show for whatever reason, the character would simply
regenerate into another incarnation, which would be represented by a new actor. Most
intriguingly, this allowed the BBC to reinvent the character every few years as well – each new
incarnation of the Doctor tended to have different mannerisms, wear different clothes, embrace
different philosophies, and generally breathe some fresh air into to a long-running show. This in
turn allowed Whovians to not only choose their own favorite version of the character⁠,
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but
created a fresh jumping-on point for new fans with each new incarnation. Much as with
Assassin’s Creed, these multiple incarnations of the Doctor each served as a subfranchise
beneath the superstory of the Doctor’s ongoing adventures, with the tentpole televised
adventures of each Doctor extended using lower-cost extensions like books, comics, audio

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Luckily for the sake of the props and sets departments, one of the trademark notions of the series is
that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
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“Who’s your Doctor?” is a favorite icebreaker question among Whovians.
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dramas and (in recent years) video games. To this day new stories are being crafted and released
about previous Doctors, leveraging the unique affordances of alternate media to deliver
sustaining, deepening engagement experiences to audiences as they follow the constantly-
unfolding superstory of the immortal Doctor.
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A second brilliant element of Doctor Who is how it developed subfranchises to target multiple
audiences. As Shenja van der Graaf and Mario Ramirez Reyes write in their transmedia criticism
of Doctor Who, “While the Doctor Who series itself generally engages a wide spectrum of
audiences covering a good deal of the four-quadrant model with its broad themes and inoffensive
content, the franchise has made skillful use of television spinoffs to target specific areas in the
quadrants that are more difficult to reach with the Doctor Who television series while
maintaining the mainstream viewing audience”. In 2006-2007, the all-ages Doctor Who launched
two separate spin-off shows, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. The Doctor himself
only showed up occasionally in The Sarah Jane Adventures and never showed up at all in
Torchwood; instead, these two subfranchises were built around particularly robust secondary
characters from Doctor Who, building out from those characters’ unique appeal. Sarah Jane, for
example, was a fan-favorite former traveling companion of the Doctor whose personality
appealed to children, so she became the centerpiece for the youth-targeted Sarah Jane
Adventures. Captain Jack Harkness, on the other hand, was a swashbuckling immortal secondary
character from the show whose rampant omnisexuality gave him much greater appeal to a more
adult audience – making him the perfect centerpiece for the adult-targeted Torchwood.
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The genius of this narrative architecture becomes apparent when we follow how the showrunners
used character crossovers to deliberately guide Doctor Who audiences to the spinoffs and back
again. As van der Graaf and Reyes point out, “the first series of Torchwood depicts events that
occur concurrently with the third season of Doctor Who, while the finale of Torchwood’s first
series leads up to the Doctor Who late-third season episode ‘Utopia’. And, although some

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Although the Doctor is immortal, actors sadly aren’t – but audio dramas allow a previous Doctor’s
actor to revisit the role years later, as a person’s voice doesn’t change nearly as much as their physical
appearance over time.
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More on both The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood in the chapter on multiplicity. Van der Graaf
and Reyes’ notes are from an essay in a book I’m currently compiling.
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characters have featured in Doctor Who and vice versa, the Doctor thus far has yet to appear on
Torchwood.” Thus audiences of Torchwood may be driven to Doctor Who, and fans of the more
risqué Jack Harkness from Doctor Who might be incentivized to follow him from Doctor Who to
Torchwood – but the Doctor himself, a much more kid-friendly character than Jack Harkness,
never appears on Torchwood, presumably so as not to lure younger fans to the adult spinoff.
Instead, the Doctor does appear on The Sarah Jane Adventures, and Sarah Jane appears on
Doctor Who – but no one from Torchwood appears on The Sarah Jane Adventures or vice-versa.
Kids may be drawn from Doctor Who to The Sarah Jane Adventures, and from The Sarah Jane
Adventures to Doctor Who, but not from Doctor Who or The Sarah Jane Adventures to
Torchwood. It’s a very elegant example of skillfully architecting the connections between the
subfranchises, while still connecting them together in the mega-franchise superstory of the
Doctor and his friends.
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Side-Stories
Star Wars, Assassin’s Creed and Doctor Who all have terrific examples of a primary simple-
story expanded out into an extensible franchise-level super-story with additional stories slotted in
between episodes of the main story. These additional side-stories may or may not move the
primary super-story forward, and may or may not feature the main characters from the primary
story – and may not feature any characters from the primary story at all.
These side-stories are good candidates for transmedia extensions – and, conversely, transmedia
extensions often function well as side-stories – because of how well they address a central design
challenge of transmedia storytelling. As Jason Mittell writes, in his analysis of transmedia
storytelling in Complex TV:
How do you create narrative extensions from an ongoing core franchise that
reward fans seeking out canon but do not become essential consumption for
single-medium fans, especially when the core narrative experience is serialized
over time and requires a sustained investment in time and attention? In other

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See the chapters on leveraged affordances and shared authorship for more on Doctor Who.
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words, the constraints of the television industry and norms of television
consumption insist that transmedia extensions from a serial franchise must
reward those who partake in them but cannot punish those who do not.
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To return to my primary argument and metaphor of transmedia storyworld design as a kind of
game design, one approach is to think of such side-stories as side quests. In role-playing games
(RPGs), side quests are additional missions that the player can take on over the course of the
game. Side quests are usually optional, and may or may not connect directly to the game’s main
storyline. If the heroic knight’s main quest has her saving the castle from an impending
onslaught of orc warriors, then a side-quest might feature a child from the castle asking the
knight to help him find his lost dog. If the story were unfolding in real time, taking the time to
find a dog when there is a phalanx of orcs descending upon the castle would be ludicrous – but
in one of those “suspension of disbelief” quirks common in video games, the orcs will most
likely politely wait to lay siege until some other triggering event, like the hero arriving on the
battlements of the castle to witness their arrival. Therefore, the player’s brave knight has plenty
of time to help find Fido. Another quirk of video games dictates that finding Fido may yield
some additional benefit that will help the knight in the impending battle with the orcs. This may
take the form of additional experience points that will advance the knight in levels and thus
increase their attack and defense points, or it might take the form of a special item (e.g., Fido’s
owner might reward the knight with a new sword or special orc-resistant helmet), or it might
even add a special bit of additional knowledge (Fido might be hiding in a secret passage the orcs
had dug beforehand, so finding Fido leads the knight to block the secret passage and make the
subsequent onslaught that much easier because, hey, fewer orcs).
In narrative design, side-stories can provide similar value to the audience. They might provide
some additional information that adds value to their understanding of the storyworld (much more
of this in the next chapter, Additive Comprehension), or it might function as a jumping-on point
for new audiences. It might also provide a badly-needed bit of levity during a particularly heavy
stretch of the story, or provide the writers or the actors in a TV show with an opportunity to try
something new. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had two episodes in particular that still added to the
overall narrative thrust of the season (and, in true Whedon style, had its supernatural element

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Mittell 2015, p. 303.
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serve as a metaphor for the life lesson Buffy and her friends were learning at the time) but
delivered a spectacular stylistic break from the norms of the series: the musical episode “Once
More with Feeling” and its utterly silent antithesis “Hush”. The Buffy spinoff Angel had its own
legendary weird episode in “Puppet Time,” wherein David Boreanaz’ titular lead woke up to find
himself transformed into a Jim Henson-esque puppet. These episodes marginally moved the
overall plot forward, and could have been considered ‘optional,’ but the audience’s experience of
the franchise as a whole was improved if they experienced them. (Again, more on this in the
next chapter.)
The key bit to understand is that Audiences watch mythology episodes for different reasons than
they watch standalone, monster-of-the-week “side stories”, just as players pursue optional side
quests for different reasons than they pursue the main narrative. Pursuit of the main “mythology”,
the main story, is motivated primarily by a desire to find out what happens next. Pursuit of side-
stories is motivated primarily by a desire for more of the experience, or for a deeper
understanding of the world.
Structurally speaking, however, no TV show better illustrates the concept of side-stories than,
arguably, the show that introduced the concept of the ‘mythology episode’ in the first place: The
X-Files.

Case Study: The X-Files
Chris Carter’s The X-Files introduced audiences to David Duchovny’s conspiracy theorist FBI
agent Fox Mulder and his skeptic partner, Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully. Over nine seasons
from 1994 to 2002, two feature films (1998’s The X-Files: Fight the Future and 2008’s The X-
Files: I Want to Believe), two special event miniseries in 2016 and 2018, and countless
transmedia extensions in books, comics and video games, Mulder and Scully investigated
hundreds of ‘x-files,’ the FBI’s secret collection of cases featuring the weird, monstrous, alien or
otherwise impossible.
The ultimate x-file was the one that served as Mulder’s primary motivation: the abduction of his
sister Samantha by aliens when Mulder was a young boy. That experience was what motivated
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Mulder to join the FBI in the first place, and what led him to dedicate his life to investigating the
x-files. As Mulder dug deeper, he found more and more evidence of a much vaster conspiracy,
one that involved his own father and the mysterious ‘Cigarette Smoking Man’ that would serve
as the series’ “Big Bad” over its entire run.
That conspiracy served as a structural “red thread” connecting the entirety of the franchise
together – but The X-Files did something very interesting. Instead of consisting of entirely self-
contained episodes like similar science fiction show Star Trek: The Next Generation or of purely
serialized episodes like more “soapy” show General Hospital, The X-Files created a combination
of both. The X-Files would consist primarily of standalone episodes, but these would be
interspersed with episodes that would focus on Mulder’s quixotic quest to find his sister and the
ever-unfolding conspiracy. The standalone episodes came to be known as “monster of the week
episodes”, and the conspiracy episodes came to be known as “mythology” episodes. The monster
of the week episodes functioned essentially as mini-movies that could bring in new audiences on
any given week, and were enjoyable even if viewers couldn’t catch the show every week
(historically the primary motivation for making shows’ episodes self-contained). For the most
part, each season finale featured some major new discovery in Mulder’s investigation of the
conspiracy, the investigation of which would throw Mulder and Scully into ever-elevating levels
of danger and/or personal crisis. The first feature film, Fight the Future, was, in essence, a
feature-length mythology episode.
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In essence, the mythology episodes of The X-Files were the primary story of the show. The
monster of the week episodes – and there were some doozies! – were essentially side-stories.

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One drawback to this strategy was that Carter and his team couldn’t win when it came to feature films.
Some critics complained that Fight the Future required audiences to have watched the show to have any
understanding of what was going on. Carter et al dutifully produced their second feature film, I Want to
Believe, as a feature-length monster of the week episode. Fans were intensely annoyed that it didn’t focus
on the mythology. Rumor has it the aliens could see Carter throw up his hands from space.
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This model was thrown into sharp relief in 2005 when FOX released four boxed sets of only the
mythology episodes as, naturally enough, “The Mythology Collection”. Fans who just wanted
the core story could watch these episodes and “get” The X-Files. More dedicated fans could get
the full boxed sets of all nine seasons to experience that story and all the side-stories.

The Challenge of Extensions
There's an intrinsic challenge to extending a storyworld beyond the central storyline, especially
with side-stories that are, by definition, largely optional, or prequels that lead up to events
audiences already know very well. “What happens next?” is almost always more compelling than
“What happened before?” or “What happened between?”
Even most mysteries are more about seeing how the characters solve the mystery and react, more
than simply solving the mystery itself. The exception is when the characters know the answer,
and it’s only the audience who still needs to fill in those gaps. This can be obnoxious, and irritate
audiences.
I should note here that this is a point of some contention between Henry Jenkins and myself. As
Jenkins rightly argues, “more story” is enough for quite a few fans to justify plunking down their
twenty bucks, and those fans that are particularly driven by an interest in the relationships
between the characters more than any overarching super-plot may not care as much about the
mysteriousness of the content within – they just want to see those moments when two characters
first met (as in the first meeting between Han and Chewie in Solo). I see that argument and I
understand that motivation, but I maintain that some degree of mystery virtually always makes
for a better story. If we’d been told in some film that Han and Chewie were the only two human-
and-Wookiee buddies in the galaxy, that their friendship was unique or, better yet, totally
forbidden, then the story of how those two came to become friends would have been much more
intriguing. As Jenkins pointed out to me during our conversation, it’s always interesting to find
out how two friends of yours, or better yet your parents or grandparents, first met, but as I told
him, it’s still a more interesting stories if that had been a forbidden friendship or a star-crossed
love…
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But I digress. So why create standalone or side-stories?
• They can serve as jumping-on points for new audiences. A good standalone episode (like
X-Files’ “The Host”) can be shown to friends curious about a series but hesitant to
commit.
• They can be used as inventory stories, deployed when main mythology episodes are
delayed (not uncommon in comics), or to sustain interest between major
releases/mythology drops.
• They can be used to test out new characters, or even serve as backdoor pilots for other
shows (see NCIS: New Orleans).
• They can give storytellers a chance to experiment with new formats (like Buffy’s
aforementioned "Once More, with Feeling" musical episode).
• They can be used to pad out an otherwise short piece of content.
The trick is to develop side-stories or other extensions that have a significantly transformative
effect on how we understand the rest of the storyworld. We'll cover this in the next chapter,
Additive Comprehension.

Evaluating Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture
Evaluating an existing storyworld’s narrative architecture begins with evaluating the scale upon
which that story is told. I sat in on numerous pitch sessions at Microsoft Studios where creators
brought us ideas for story-driven games that were really compelling – but they hadn’t given
sufficient thought to where the experience could go after the first game. What they had was a fun
story, but they didn’t have a sufficient superstory that could support an extensible narrative
architecture.
I can hear you scoffing. “Sure,” you might protest, “but not every storyworld needs to be Halo!”
True, it’s easy to make a science fiction epic into a transmedia storyworld that unfolds across an
entire entertainment platform for a decade or more, with battles raging across hundreds of
planets and engaging dozens of species. It’s harder to imagine a romantic comedy at such a scale
– but not impossible. The trick is to determine what big, big story is being told.
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A romantic comedy like When Harry Met Sally is all about, naturally, when Harry met Sally and
the two of them fell in love (albeit over a decade or so). However, there’s no reason a
multigenerational inter-family drama like Dallas couldn’t be played for laughs, thus creating a
vast romantic comedy epic primed for transmedia extensions. The pivot point is expanding the
story from just the two romantic leads out to their entire families, and the conflicts and crises and
collisions that result. Such an approach has been the engine behind countless soap operas, many
of whom were some of the longest-running shows on television and beyond.
It’s rare that a storyworld can’t be extended in such a way, but it does happen. One of the core
differences between The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth that I outlined in my research back at MIT
is how The Dark Crystal was created as a world, but Labyrinth was bookended with the
suggestion that the entire story was just a dream. The filmmakers built in a Wizard of Oz-style
plausible out at the end to crack open the door for future extension, but suggesting that a
storyworld begins and ends between the ears of a protagonist places a lot of constraints upon the
possible scale of a world. If the storyworld you’re considering seems like it’s been unnecessarily
bookended in such a way, look for escape hatches that the storyteller might have built in
(intentionally or unintentionally). Could it be a shared dreamworld that everyone visits in their
dreams (a la Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or aboriginal mythology)? Could it be something that other
members of the protagonist’s family also has access to, or passes access to from generation to
generation?
If a storyworld has sufficient scale to support multiple sub-franchises, and is being pitched with
multiple sub-franchises as a part of the package, the key is then to evaluate the strength of the
bonds between the multiple sub-franchises and to assess the value of each one both individually
and as a package. The combination of Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Chronicles and Torchwood
as a complete package was brilliant because of how they represented a Venn diagram of age
demographics: The Sarah Jane Chronicles was primarily for younger audiences, Torchwood was
almost exclusively for older audiences, and Doctor Who provided a “all-family” experience that
everyone could enjoy together. This allowed the total of the Doctor Who franchise to succeed as
much more of a four-quadrant property than any of the three might do on their own.

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Creating Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture
The best way to build transmedia architecture into an IP is to take a step back, evaluate the story
that’s being told, and then ask whether that story is suited to one experience, multiple
experiences, or across an entire vast franchise. Is your story just one story, or part of a
superstory? Is it strong enough to support multiple subfranchises starring separate characters, or
even wholly separate sets of characters?
Take the long view on your storyworld. What's the big, big story of your storyworld? What's the
biggest conflict - which can also inform the most immediate conflict at the heart of every
component of your franchise? This is very easy to do in science fiction and fantasy, but
extensible narrative architectures certainly aren’t constrained to science fiction. What are some
possible models for extensible narrative architectures that work well both in and out of science
fiction?
• The rise and fall of a family. This is perhaps the oldest story structure, and it has driven
countless dramas over the centuries. This structure has proven highly extensible because
such tales can unfold over multiple generations. In science fiction this structure is found
most prominently in Star Wars with the house of Skywalker (the fall of Anakin and his
redemption by Luke, of course, but also in the extended universe extensions about their
ancestors and descendents). We also see this approach in many soap operas like The
Young and the Restless, and in story franchises like The Godfather - not to mention
classical mythology and history. In such a model, the subfranchises frequently focus on
generations within the family (as most recently seen in TNT's resuscitation of Dallas) but
subfranchises could also function as spin-offs following different siblings, cousins and so
on.
• The rise of one family and the fall of another. Closely linked to the first story structure
(and therefore perhaps the second oldest), this extensible story structure focuses on how
the rise of one family is inextricably linked to the fall of another. This more political
version can be found in such science fiction and fantasy franchises as Frank Herbert's
Dune or George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, and is frequently found in the same soap
operas, myths, and religions. This added complexity is what truly drives many soap
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operas - the tale of a single family's rise and fall is interesting, to be sure, but pitting
multiple equally sympathetic (and/or abominable) families against each other over
multiple generations is a great recipe for long-term storytelling. The Hatfields and the
McCoys, the Carringtons and the Colbys, the Lannisters and the Starks - the list goes ever
on and on. In this story structure, subfranchises can develop similarly around different
generations or branches of the rival families, but also on the families themselves.
• The rise and fall of rival ideologies. Another vastly extensible franchise arises when we
zoom out even further from families to clashing ideologies. How abstract this gets
depends on how many degrees out we zoom, from families to towns to states to countries
to continents to planets and so on, with the added axis of conflicting religions,
philosophies, ethics, etc. At its most abstract, this is "good versus evil", as seen in
countless storyworlds – Jedi vs. the Sith, Autobots vs. Decepticons, G.I. Joe vs. Cobra.
In each of these models, you will quickly find you have implicit sets of characters, most of
whom are to be found in different locations. Each one of those characters-and-settings
combinations can most likely support its own sub-franchise, especially when you consider how
each of them fit into a larger superstory. What impact does each of the smaller combinations’
stories have on the bigger story? Answer that question, and you’re on the right path to ensuring
your sub-franchises make, as Jenkins argues, a “distinct and valuable contribution to the whole.”

Action: Evaluating Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture
1. Choose a storyworld for evaluation.
2. Is there sufficient scale to the story for it to be considered a storyworld? Is the
story best suited to one experience, multiple experiences, or across an entire vast
franchise? Is the story just one story, or part of a superstory? Is it strong enough to
support multiple subfranchises starring separate characters, or even wholly
separate sets of characters?
3. What's the big, big story of the storyworld? What's the biggest conflict - which
can also inform the most immediate conflict at the heart of every component of
the franchise?
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4. How much value do the smaller stories being told in the sub-franchises contribute
to the superstory being told?
5. How much value do the sub-franchises add to the total value of the overall
franchise? Do they broaden the possible audience? Do they provide a better,
richer overall experience? When taken in total, do they improve the odds of the
overall franchise becoming a hit?

Action: Creating Extensible Narrative Architecture and Fractal Storytelling
1. Refine your story. Revise and polish your Simple-Story in section 3.2 of your
NDD, based on your new world and character development.
2. In a short essay, identify what sets of characters and settings fall out of your super
story as it unfolds across multiple generations or across multiple places. What is
the conflict in each of those sub-stories, and how do they contribute to the larger
super-story?
3. Fractally expand your Simple-Story out into a multi-episode Super-Story,
comprised of multiple Simple-Stories. Enter a high-level description of this
Super-Story into section 3.3 of your NDD.
4. Identify the core theme of your storyworld that will resonate between your
Simple-Story and your Super-Story. Enter this into section 1.2 of your NDD.
5. Identify three Side-Stories that can slot into your Simple-Story and/or Super-Story.
(These may well have emerged during your Character Stories from previous
weeks.) Enter these into section 3.4 of your NDD.
6. Map out how your Simple-Story, Super-Story and Side-Stories relate to one
another. Enter this into section 3.1 of your NDD.

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Example: Fractal Storytelling and Extensible Narrative Architecture in
Spookshow
By this point in Spookshow’s development I had an idea that I wanted to tell a multi-generational
story. I had an inkling that I wanted Casey’s story to be one of redemption, as her actions caused
her kid sister to be harmed somehow and Casey would have to set out to make things right. This
quest for redemption would be what would propel Casey, and my audience, through the larger
world.
As I kept building out this concept, I soon realized that this search for redemption was a much
bigger theme than I’d originally expected. Casey’s “original sin” might have been largely
juvenile selfishness (wanting to see a Spookshow against her parents’ wishes), but going after
what one wants and then dealing with the unforeseen consequences – of doing the wrong thing
for what one perceives as the right reasons – is a universal story, just the kind of resonant
simple-story myth that could power a really big storyworld. I began thinking about all the ways
that such a theme could recur throughout the story that I was telling, and the answers were
incredibly powerful.
If my central deviation from reality, the magical Great Disaster near the end of WWI that remade
the Western United States into the Great Wilderness, was caused by magicians doing the wrong
thing for the right reasons, then how could that generate a narrative drive for multiple characters
over multiple years? Pieces began to click together quickly – what if Casey’s parents aren’t just
magicians in hiding but were directly responsible for the Great Disaster? What if their moving to
Illinois, right near the edge of the Great Disaster, wasn’t an act of self-preservation but an act of
penance? Why would they do that? What could they hope to change?
Furthermore, what if the reason why Sebastian Shade agrees to help Casey and her sister Molly
was also an act of penance? What if Shade wasn’t who he said he was, but was also one of the
magicians who caused the Great Disaster? What if he was also in hiding, and was in the States
looking for Casey’s parents? What if he was looking for them also to atone for something –
perhaps for betraying them in a way that led to their unwilling participation in the Great
Disaster? What if that betrayal was another wrong thing done for what at the time he had
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believed were the right reasons? How could that have gone down, and how would that have
shaped the character’s growth over time?
Finally, the big one – what if the events of the time had led everyone to do the wrong thing for
what they perceived were the right reasons? History is littered with horrific actions done when
people were persuaded to do something monstrous largely out of fear. That fear could have
motivated Shade’s betrayal – but the monstrous act of the Great Disaster could have resulted in
an even more monstrous reaction. Knowing that people tend to retrench into conservatism when
they’re scared by something they don’t understand, then being faced with something at the scale
of the Great Disaster could result in a massive retrenchment, and knowing that absolute power
corrupts absolutely, if such a massive religious revival were to be co-opted by corrupt leadership
that strategically exploited that consolidation of power, then the result could be a nightmarish
new Dark Age of Holy Terror. Boom – my simple-story of redemption for something as simple
as sneaking off against your parents’ wishes was expanded fractally out into seeking redemption
for enabling a world-changing war crime. In both the simple-story and the super-story, my
haunted heroes would do anything to set things right. I had found my theme.
With that in mind, I deliberately architected three parts of Spookshow to occur several years apart
– 1928, 1921, and 1917 – in reverse order, because I wanted to set up a series of mysteries that
would retroactively reveal these thematic echoes. Casey’s story in 1928 would prompt the
audience to wonder why Sebastian Shade was helping her. This would be answered by Shade’s
story in 1921 – but that story would prompt the audience to wonder what was motivating him to
cross the United States looking for someone. That would be answered in a third story in 1917,
which would reveal how Shade’s betrayal of Casey’s parents led directly to the Great Disaster.
This narrative architecture also enabled subfranchises to emerge around each key year; much like
in Star Wars, additional stories could be added to explain what happened in the interim. I began
to develop my larger franchise plan with extensions to fill in those gaps in strategic ways as the
main story in 1928 continued to move forward, much like Desmond’s super-story in Assassin’s
Creed enabled sub-franchises to emerge in flashback sequences. As Casey’s story continued, it
would pose additional mysteries that would be answered in additional stories.
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There’s a lot of story still to be told around each of these installments, and enough other major
world events in those years to power those potential subfranchises for years. I was also careful to
architect in hooks for other stories in other places, especially tales that more carefully flesh out
the history of the magicians in Europe, their role in the larger conflict, and what happened to
them after the Great Disaster.
Moving forward, the idea is to continue the story in similar transmedia bursts, with the
“mothership” of the story unfolding in an episodic animated series that could run from 1928
through the beginning of World War II in 1939, and beyond. Each major milestone in that series
(e.g., the beginning of a second season) could be accompanied by the release of additional stories
set in the past, much as I did with the initial release, with tales that add significantly to how the
audience understands each new main chapter in the tentpole narrative.
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This strategic series of
setups and payoffs trades directly on the concept of additive comprehension.

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This would be similar to how each season of Lost was accompanied by transmedia extensions and
intra-episode scenes that leapt forwards and backwards in time.
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7. Additive Comprehension
Additive comprehension is the change in how an audience understands the story after
experiencing another component of it. This is the reward, the payoff, the a-ha moment that
the audience earns for their expenditure of time/energy/money required to pursue the
transmedia story.
A narrative designer can design each component of a storyworld to not only move the story
forward, but to have a transformative effect on how the audience understands the other
components in the storyworld. A component that is secondary to the primary storyline,
such as a tie-in novel, spinoff show, or other extension, may not be necessary to understand
the overall story, but it should ideally contain enough added value to, as Henry Jenkins
writes, make a “distinct and valuable contribution” to the audience’s understanding of the
storyworld. For example, the graphic novel Firefly: The Shepard’s Tale fills in a character’s
mysterious background that’s only hinted at in the TV show and film, and thus offers a
significant value proposition to would-be audiences, justifying their invested energy.

Additive comprehension is arguably the ultimate method for defeating transmedia resistance.
You can make a story franchise spectacularly easy to discover, collect, consume or react to, but
if the payoff for all that work isn’t there, the result frequently feels narratively unfulfilling. There
is a seemingly endless library of Star Wars tie-in novels, comics, games and other transmedia
extensions, but it’s almost impossible to know which ones “matter,” or contain something in
them that is of sufficient narrative importance to truly add to my understanding of the world.
In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins described the components of a transmedia story as
“making a distinct and valuable contribution to the whole”. It’s that ‘valuable’ part that’s the
kicker. In his later blog post "Transmedia Storytelling 101," Jenkins clarified this idea through
what he called additive comprehension:
Game designer Neil Young coined the term ‘additive comprehension’ to refer to
the ways that each new text adds a new piece of information which forces us to
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revise our understanding of the fiction as a whole. His example was the addition
of an image of an origami unicorn to the director’s cut edition of Blade Runner,
an element which raised questions about whether the protagonist might be a
replicant. Transmedia producers have found it difficult to achieve the delicate
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.
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The best transmedia extensions thus result in a feeling that, because an audience member
experienced more of the transmedia extensions, they are having a richer experience than other
audience members who didn’t drill as deeply into the storyworld as you did.
When done well, this additive comprehension can be absolutely transformative.

Case Study: Why So Serious?
My favorite example of this is Why So Serious, the alternate reality game produced for
Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight. As Andrea Philips describes it in A
Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling:
Why So Serious?, the immersive marketing campaign that 42 Entertainment
created for The Dark Knight, acted as a direct prequel to the movie. This allowed
audiences to walk into theaters already familiar with many of the characters and
dynamics, particularly those surrounding the election of Gotham City district
attorney candidate Harvey Dent.
The game’s audience was even the Joker’s accomplice in the theft of a school bus
that the Joker uses to make his getaway in the opening moments of the film. This
created an instant connection between the two pieces, and made those in the
audience suddenly feel like they had been a part of something greater than
themselves – that they had a direct and very personal connection to the movie.

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Jenkins 2007.
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The campaign created a situation where small elements of the film felt like a big
payoff to the audience.
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My favorite example of additive comprehension in Why So Serious came in the form of a non-
player character (NPC) that guides the player when they’re playing a vigilante trying to support
Batman. They’re effectively playing the same wannabe-heroes that Batman saves from the
Scarecrow in the opening scene of the film – and, in fact, the NPC guide character is the one who
whines to Batman, “What makes you so different from us?”
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This also happens to be the same
character that the Joker tortures and kills later in the film, slamming his body up against the
mayor’s window and scaring the dickens out of the audience. To players of the game, however,
this was more than just a cheap startling thrill – it was an emotional gut punch, because the Joker
had just killed a character they’d spent weeks getting to know and like. At that moment in the
theater, you could literally tell who had played the game and who hadn’t, based on who was
gasping the loudest. It was a terrific bit of additive comprehension, and the kind of added
emotional investment and enjoyment that the best intertextual connections can provide.

Case Study: The Matrix
One of the most well-known examples of additive comprehension from recent years comes from
The Matrix. As I described earlier, The Matrix has several key elements of additive
comprehension. When The Kid first appears at the beginning of The Matrix Reloaded, he comes
running up to greet Neo like he's an old friend. Meanwhile, audiences are left wondering who the
heck this guy is and why we're supposed to know him – unless those audiences saw "The Kid's
Story," one of the animated shorts in The Animatrix. That story tells how Neo and The Kid first
met, and why he treats Neo like he's his personal savior. If you've seen that short, that opening
scene to Reloaded makes much more sense.
Perhaps a more instructive example from The Matrix is how it over-relied on additive
comprehension. At the end of The Matrix Revolutions, the third film in the trilogy, Neo and

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Phillips 2012, p. 29.
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Batman’s snarled response: “I’m not wearing hockey pants.” Priceless.
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Trinity make a journey to the "real-world" home of the robots, Machine City. Once there, they
make an impassioned plea for the robots to, essentially, quit it. They ask the robots to knock it
off and to help the humans instead of using them as living batteries – and, improbably, the robots
do. It's a shockingly anticlimactic ending to the trilogy – unless, again, you've seen the movies'
extensions. The two-part animated short film "The Second Renaissance" in The Animatrix tells
the story of how the robots' civilization first began, and explains how they came to the humans
for help but were arrogantly refused. To have the humans come to them and humbly ask for help
was enough of a reversal that it effectively ended the war. It's still somewhat improbable, but this
extra context makes the ending of the film at least plausible, and – as I noted earlier – much
more emotionally resonant and significantly more satisfying. The trouble is, without that extra
additive comprehension, the experience of the story is pretty dissatisfying, and the films on their
own fail to deliver the most important thing: a good story.

Writing Like a Game Designer
The art of creating additive comprehension is the art of crafting rewards. This is the stuff that
makes the participants that followed your storyworld across multiple media feel like insiders, the
stuff that rewards all the work your participants put into overcoming their transmedia resistance.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the stuff that makes your transmedia experience worth
it. This is the payoff.
This is true if you're writing a science fiction mega-epic like Star Wars, but it's also true if you're
attempting to develop a transmedia storyworld that's a period drama, or a romantic comedy.
Again, Phillips from A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling:
With a deft touch, you can even turn prosaic or comic moments into a payoff,
because you’ve imbued them with a significance where there was none before. If
a character fumbles with a coffee cup, drops it, and it breaks in one medium, you
can build backward from there so that this is just the latest in a long series of
broken cups, turning something that could have just been a symptom of one
moment of feeling shaken into the last straw. Or maybe you can build in a history
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of that particular coffee cup, making it a gift from a beloved but deceased friend
to add fresh poignancy to that moment.
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Part of what I was studying in that class I mentioned with Jeff Watson way back in the
Introduction to this document, and in another directed research course at USC with Kiki Benzon,
was the art of writing like a game designer. I don’t mean writing for games, I mean writing a
story with a careful mind towards crafting the story like a puzzle. Mystery novels are one of the
oldest forms of (written) playful storytelling, as the reader is effectively engaging in a race with
the author to see if they can guess the solution to the mystery before the detective (and thus the
author) does at the end of the book. The art of a good mystery is opening up a series of questions
and providing a series of plausible answers, paired with an ever-heightening sense of intrigue,
suspense and – of course – drama. This sounds an awful lot like a kind of narrative game, so if
you make that implicit design explicit, a very useful technique for designing invaluable narrative
comprehension begins to emerge: it's not enough to simply tell someone more about something
that fills in a gap – if one story tells what happens at 11PM and at 7AM in someone's day, and
another story reveals that the time between 11PM and 7AM is spent sleeping, that is technically
a form of additive comprehension, but it's not compelling. What you need isn’t filling in a gap,
it’s posing a mystery.
This is one of the challenges that typically plague prequels that were never planned for in the
first place, or that weren't planned for well. Let’s return again to my beloved example of this in
Star Wars, when Obi-Wan Kenobi tells young Luke Skywalker that he fought with Luke's father
in the Clone Wars. One word in that sentence ratchets that empty space from a gap to a mystery
– the word 'clone'. To say that Obi-Wan fought with Luke's father Anakin in the war is
interesting (and, in retrospect, is darkly amusing since Obi-Wan fought with Anakin in both
senses of the word, both beside him and against him) but audiences already know what wars are.
It's when the word 'clone' is thrown in that people wonder – what the heck is a clone war? How
does a clone war differ from a 'regular' war? What's it like to fight with, or over, clones?
The difference between a gap and a mystery is the amount of motivation someone is willing to
invest in it. Not knowing something that can be known with a tiny bit of effort is mildly

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Philips 2012, p. 81.
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interesting but not that compelling. A mystery, on the other hand, suggests something that no one
knows – and the truly unknown is something that humans find almost inherently intriguing. It's
why we've always grappled with the big questions – what comes after death? Why are we here?
Why do people act the way they do? How did we get here? Why is the world the way it is?
What's in that empty spot on the map?
At the most basic level, mysteries happen when something unusual happens, and we don't know
why. When something normal happens and we don't know why, it's not that interesting. When
something unusual happens and we do know why, it's interesting but, again, not that interesting.
At another level up, good mysteries are when something unusual happens and the reason is itself
unusual. When something unusual happens, like spotting a sea serpent in a lake, but that is then
revealed to be something mundane like a half-submerged log, that's disappointing. When
someone suddenly dies but it's later revealed that they had a heart attack or some other long-
running pre-existing condition, that's nowhere near as interesting as murder – which is an
unusual reason. Even murder, though, can be mundane when there is only one suspect.
This leads to the insight that, at the next level above that, the best mysteries are when something
unusual happens, the reason behind it is unusual – and leads to more mysteries. Murder isn't
interesting enough to drive a novel – it needs to be a whodunit, with multiple suspects who could
have done the deed, or a "locked room" mystery in which there is no suspect and no obvious way
that the deed could have been done. There's an old writer's trick that holds that that all answers
should pose new questions. (Some authors believe that every answer should pose at least two
new questions.) This is one of the reasons that the Star Wars prequels felt stiff, because they
answered a ton of questions (like what a clone war was like, and who was under Boba Fett's
helmet) but they didn't ask any new ones. Further, the answers that the prequels provided weren't
that transformative. We found out a great deal more about Anakin Skywalker's transformation
into Darth Vader, and Anakin's relationship with Obi-Wan, but very little of what we learned in
those movies had a truly transformative impact upon how we viewed the original films. The
greatest failure of the prequels is that they didn't do a solid enough job of making Anakin
Skywalker a sympathetic character. (Whether that failure happened in the writing or the acting is
a debate best left to message boards or long car trips.)
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Long story short, I believe the best intertextual connections happen when they solve mysteries.
So what kinds of mysteries could such intertextual connections solve?
Here are 55 mysterious story prompts:
1. Why does someone behave the way they do?
2. Why does someone hate someone else?
3. How did a forbidden love come about?
4. Why did someone do something which was completely out of character?
5. Why did someone kill someone else?
6. Why did someone disappear?
7. Why did someone suddenly give away their most treasured possession?
8. Why did someone give up their child?
9. What is the family secret that no one will ever discuss?
10. What made two formerly deeply loving siblings swear to never speak again?
11. What is the family curse, where did it come from, and what did they do to deserve
it?
12. Why is there an empty space in an otherwise completely full map?
13. What happened during a period of lost time?
14. What is the truth behind stories of a completely impossible monster?
15. Where did a legendary object come from?
16. What did someone do to be awarded a legendary object?
17. What did someone do to be awarded a legendary title?
18. What is the story behind how someone discovered how to do something they
immediately swore to never do, or even speak of, again?
19. How did someone turn into a monster?
20. Where did the monster come from?
21. What started the war?
22. How was the war won?
23. What started a war between two previously completely peaceful countries?
24. What made the world's oldest religion fall?
25. What made the world's oldest, sturdiest structure collapse?
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26. What made the world's oldest, sturdiest structure disappear?
27. What made two natural enemies into allies?
28. How did a beggar become the world's wealthiest man overnight?
29. How did the world's wealthiest man become a beggar overnight?
30. How did a foreign child come to live with a family?
31. How did someone come back from the dead?
32. What happened when someone went somewhere no one had ever gone before?
33. How did someone come back from someplace no one had ever returned from
before?
34. What made someone lose his mind?
35. How did the virgin get pregnant?
36. Why would someone be heartbroken over the loss of an apparently mundane
object?
37. Why would someone be willing to kill for an apparently mundane object?
38. How did someone receive a scar?
39. What is the story behind a strange trophy?
40. How did the unkillable man become unkillable?
41. How did the unkillable man die?
42. Where did the unreadable book come from?
43. Who wrote the unreadable book?
44. What does the unreadable book say?
45. How did the lost city fall?
46. Who built the lost city?
47. Who lives in the city of ghosts?
48. Who made the unstoppable machine?
49. How was the unstoppable machine destroyed?
50. What does the incomprehensible symbol mean?
51. What's the story behind the monster?
52. Who is the bastard king's true father?
53. Where did the plague come from?
54. Why does the plague work the way it does?
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55. Why was the perfect victim spared?
Or, to boil this list down to four big mysteries:
1. What made the impossible impossible?
2. What made the impossible possible?
3. How did the impossible come to pass?
4. What happens after the impossible happened?
Again, the absolute best kinds of additive comprehension come when knowing the answers
radically reconfigure how we understand the work that came before, and doubly so when this is a
two-way street. If there are two connected texts, and experiencing text B after text A makes you
understand A differently, AND experiencing text A after text B makes you understand text B
differently, that's when you've pulled off something extraordinary. This is why there are so few
examples of this out in the world.
One way to think about this is that parts A and B both point towards conclusion C, but neither A
nor B make that conclusion explicit. This is one way to literally make storyworlds that are
greater than the sum of their parts.
For example:
• Story A might state that a legendary sword was forged in Burbank in 1800, but no one
knows by who.
• Story B might state that a legendary swordsmith went missing for a while in 1800. He
was last seen heading in the direction of Burbank, but no one knows what he was up to.
Neither of these are truly transformative – knowing that the legendary swordsmith was who
forged a legendary sword isn't that impressive. But what if we push it a little further? For
example:
• Story A might state that a legendary sword was forged in Burbank in 1800, but no one
knows by who. The craftsmanship looked like the work of a legendary swordsmith, but
this was impossible – the swordsmith died years ago, and he always swore he would
never even teach a son his art.
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• Story B might state that a mysterious woman passed through Burbank in 1800. The
woman is implied to be the swordsmith's daughter, whom he taught his art.
So how do you do a puzzle design that A says X, B says Y, and it's up to the reader to conclude
Z?
One way is to make Z overt through the use of an encyclopedia or notebook that populates as the
reader goes along, filling in missing pieces of the puzzle. This may be seen as a way of
systematizing what the user is perceiving, or what the user is expected to perceive. When this is
not mysterious information, statements of fact populating an encyclopedia as the user progresses
makes perfect sense. When this information is mysterious by design, however, perhaps
populating the notebook takes the fun out of it? The trick there is to systematize the answering of
questions with more questions – or having new questions appear in the unlocked answers.
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Case Study: Star Trek
Another of my favorite examples of additive comprehension can be found in Abrams' 2009
reboot of Star Trek. Paramount partnered with IDW comics to create Star Trek: Countdown, a
miniseries of comics that would lead up to the launch of the feature film. Countdown served as a
swan song for the Next Generation universe, showing what had happened to all of the main
characters from that universe before the horrible accident that led to the destruction of Romulos
and the subsequent flinging of Spock, as well as the villainous Nero and his time-traveling ship
The Nerada, back in time. Star Trek fans who read Countdown had a much better idea of what
was going on when they experienced the film.
A second comic extension from IDW, Star Trek: Nero, did an even better job of fleshing out the
story of the film. In the opening scenes of the movie, Nero and the Narada arrive back in time
and lay waste to the USS Kelvin (hence, the name of the 'Kelvin timeline'). However, the next

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This is precisely what I built in the Encyclopedia component of Spookshow. See the chapter on
“Transmedia Mechanics.”
Long 294
time we see Nero and his men in the film, they bear a significant number of scars. Nero, for
example, has had the pointy tips of his Romulan ears sheared off. Readers of the Nero comics get
that embedded character mystery (remember the chapter on Extensible Character Design?)
answered: Nero and his crew were captured by the Klingons, and spent many years being
tortured at their hands before making their escape. An ongoing series based on the Kelvin
timeline's versions of young Kirk and Spock and the rest of the Enterprise crew was launched by
IDW, and sustained audience interest until it was time for a sequel.
When that time rolled around, Paramount and IDW revisited this strategy with a second comic
miniseries, Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness. As before, Countdown to Darkness caught the
audience up on what had been happening with the main protagonists. Another series, Star Trek:
Khan, followed a similar approach to Star Trek: Nero – only in this case, it simply filled in the
origin story of the Kelvin timeline's version of the character instead of filling in a gap in the story
of the film. As before, IDW continued their comics where the sequel film left off with Star Trek:
After Darkness, which rolled directly into another ongoing series.

Action: Evaluating Additive Comprehension
1. Choose a storyworld for evaluation. Identify what its primary, "tentpole" stories
are. How do they tell the storyworld's super-story?
2. What are your chosen storyworld's side-stories, or extensions beyond the chapters
of its primary tentpole stories? What impact does experiencing those side-stories
have on the audience's understanding of the primary story? How transformative is
that impact? Does that impact primarily influence the audience's understanding of
a character's motivations, their understanding of a particular location, of a
particular period of time, or…?
3. Does the storyworld over-rely on those extensions? Does the story still make
sense without that additive comprehension?
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Action: Creating Additive Comprehension
1. Look at your map, your characters, your artifacts, and your timeline. Consider
how these elements, including the "here there be dragons" mysterious places from
Lecture 3, can connect the multiple components of your storyworld's franchise
plan together. With this in mind, revise section 3 of your NDD.
2. Revisit your map of how your Super-Story, Simple-Story and Side-Stories relate
to one another from Week Six. Use the sample franchise map as a model to chart
out these relations. Enter this into section 3.1 of your NDD.
3. Revise your Simple-Story and Super-Story to reflect this new thinking. Update
your entries for sections 3.2 and 3.3 of your NDD.

Example: Additive Comprehension in Spookshow
The additive comprehension I layered into Spookshow is significant. I took what I learned in the
courses with Jeff Watson and Kiki Benzon and crafted a great deal of Spookshow to be a kind of
narrative game, introducing mysteries that are paid off as the user continues their experience
across multiple extensions. These mysteries, and the user's progress in unlocking their answers,
are reflected in the Encyclopedia component of the experience with questions and answers that
initially appear locked but unlock as the user progresses.
Some of the major mysteries, and where they are introduced and resolved across the three
existing components of Spookshow:
• Kendra, David: What is the strange book that Kendra and David take along at the
end of Spookshow 1928?
o Opened in Spookshow 1928, scene 13
o Answered in Spookshow 1917, chapter 13
• Sebastian Shade: Who is Sebastian Shade, really?
o Introduced in Spookshow 1928, scene 6
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o Traveling as Schadel, Spookshow 1921, page 1
o Becomes Sebastian Shade, Spookshow 1921, page 30
• Shade: Why does Shade sacrifice his life so willingly for Casey and Molly?
o Opened in Spookshow 1928, scene 11
o Answered in Spookshow 1921, scene 13
• Shade: How does Shade come to join the Spookshow?
o Answered in Spookshow 1921, page 28
• Shade: How did Shade so radically change his appearance?
o Opened in Spookshow 1921, page 2
o Answered in Spookshow 1921, page 41
• Shade: Why does Shade fear water?
o Answered in Spookshow 1917, chapter 5
• Shade, Gears, Creepy: How did they meet?
o Answered in Spookshow 1921, page 31
• Father Jeremiah Stine: How did Stine hurt his hand?
o Opened in Spookshow 1921, page 28
o Answered in Spookshow 1921, page 22
• Helena MacAvoy: Why does Shade say, "What have you done?" after Helena blasts
Stine with Shade's wand?
o Opened in Spookshow 1921, page 22
o Unanswered yet (she's in the wand), but implied in Spookshow 1917, chapter 7
• Helena: Why doesn't her ghost appear to Shade?
o Opened in Spookshow 1921, page 24
o Unanswered yet (she's in the wand), but implied in Spookshow 1917, chapter 7
• Mary Cromwell: Why does she hate Shade?
o Opened in Spookshow 1921, page 31
o Answered in Spookshow 1921, page 43
• Eleanor Bergen: Who really killed Eleanor Bergen?
o Opened in Spookshow 1921, page 37
o Answered in Spookshow 1921, page 42
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I seeded the plans for many more of these mysteries and answers into the overall franchise plan,
setting it up so the extensions between each of the 13 episodes of the animated series alternate
between comics and novellas. An episode of the animation would introduce a mystery about a
character, place, or event, and the subsequent extension would provide an in-depth answer.
Another, more cursory version of that answer would be provided in the animation itself if the
question was a real show-stopper, so as not to fall into the same trap as The Matrix. Audiences
that take the time to experience all of the components will, by the end, have a much more robust
understanding of the storyworld and the relationships between the characters than those who
only experience the 'primary' story in the animation.
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8. Multiple Experience Pathways and Modularity
Successful vast storyworlds frequently offer multiple experience pathways for audiences to
follow, based on what their primary motivations are. A Star Wars fan that loves spacecraft
battles might watch the movies and play all the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter games, versus a Star
Wars fan who loves Princess Leia as a character might watch all the movies and read all the
novels and comics featuring Princess Leia. These experience pathways are designed to be
distinct and different, but equally valid. Identifying the multiple audience motivations as
outlined above and then crafting specific pathways through the storyworld for those
motivations is key to reducing transmedia resistance for those multiple audiences.
Modularity is the art of designing each component of a vast franchise to be enjoyable on its
own. This is a strong tactic for addressing transmedia resistance because, as the old comics
industry saying goes, “every comic is somebody’s first.” If a component only makes sense if
the audience has experienced every other – or a significant number of other – components
in the storyworld, they’re more likely to walk away from the storyworld than investing the
energy in tracking down the rest. As noted in the Star Wars/Clone Wars reference example
above in ‘extensible narrative architecture’, the mysteries cannot be so massive that they
disrupt the comprehensibility – and thus the enjoyability – of the component.

One of the greatest challenges in building a truly vast storyworld, especially those built with a
rich, extensible narrative architecture, is to instill a story structure that is near-endlessly
"drillable", as Jason Mittell puts it, with enough alluring mysteries to make audiences want to do
that drilling. When done improperly, as science fiction author M. John Harrison warns,
storytellers run the risk of alienating their audiences through the “great clomping foot of
nerdism”:
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing
over worldbuilding.

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Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalizes the urge to invent. Worldbuilding
gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading).
Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfill their part of the bargain,
because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to
get done.
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot
of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good
writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible,
& if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but
the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study.
This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the
worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.
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The development of a full, well-rounded world with its own internal logic and consistency is
critical, especially in any enterprise that involves multiple authors. So how, then, does a
storyteller introduce that world to her audience without all the foot-clomping? One approach is
the skillful, strategic use of negative space, negative capability and migratory cues.

Negative Space, Negative Capability and Migratory Cues
“...No author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding,
would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's
understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to
imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally paying
him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his
imagination as busy as my own.” – Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
147

146
Harrison 2007.
147
Hutchinson 1983, p. 22.
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Many vast transmedia storyworlds function much like enormous websites, where these
experience paths of time, characters, locations and objects functioning much like user pathways
or scenarios. The “hyperlinks” in this metaphor, the linkages that join the disparate extensions
together into these experience flows, are a combination of negative space, negative capability
and migratory cues.
Negative spaces in stories are much the same as negative spaces in paintings or other visual art:
sections that are deliberately left empty as a part of the overall design. Negative capability is the
capacity of the human imagination to fill in those negative spaces in a story without jarring the
audience out of the flow of the narrative. The first known usage of the term is found in a letter
from the poet John Keats in 1817. In it, Keats writes:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several
things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form
a Man of Achievement especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed
so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being
in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason...
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When building a transmedia story, storytellers can use a strategic combination of negative space
and negative capability to evoke a similar delicious sense of 'uncertainty, Mystery, or doubt' in
their audience. When a storyteller creates a negative space by briefly mentioning an event, a
person, a place or artifact in passing, the audience’s imagination – its negative capability – will
fill in those gaps without disrupting the suspension of disbelief and jolting them out of the
experience. Once more, let’s return to how Star Wars introduces the Clone Wars when Luke
Skywalker meets Obi-Wan Kenobi:
Luke: You fought in the Clone Wars?
Obi-Wan: I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father.
In only a few short words, a much grander sense of history and scale is granted to both Obi-
Wan’s character and to the larger storyworld. Audiences didn’t rise up in revolt at this point of

148
Keats 1818.
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the story, demanding the projectionists stop the film so they could find out what Obi-Wan was
talking about, thanks to their own negative capability.
Another approach exemplified by Star Wars is the “mysterious character”. Growing up in the
1980s, my friends and I would debate for hours who was under Boba Fett's helmet. I was a big
fan of robots, so I believed Boba Fett was a droid. My friend who was a huge monster fan
believed Boba Fett was a disgusting, drooling alien, and our other friend, who happened to be a
girl, believed Boba Fett was Han Solo's long-lost sister. All of us were filling in that gap with our
own imaginations with the stories that were the most interesting to us.
This is an old, old old storyteller's trick. Imagine we're all in a horror movie right now, and from
outside the door there comes a scratch, scratch, scraaaaatch. Until I, as the storyteller, open that
door for you, if you're afraid of wolves it's going to be a wolf outside that door. If you're afraid of
spiders, it's going to be a spider outside that door. And if you're afraid of plumbers, it's-a gonna
be Mario, the plumber from hell, outside that door. Because our imaginations are filling in the
gaps for us, telling us the best stories for us.
This can be a problem, because if someone like Lucas comes back and answers those questions
in ways that are not as good as the stories we in the audience told ourselves, you start winding up
with disappointing stories and disappointed audiences; so much time had passed between the
original Star Wars trilogy and the prequels that all of us who had grown up with the original
trilogy had our own, deeply personalized and deeply beloved answers to the questions Lucas
posed in Episodes IV, V and VI. The trick as a storyteller is to deliver something that is just
orthogonal enough to what we might have told ourselves to surprise us, to keep us engaged in the
story and to keep coming back to see what surprises the storyteller has for us next.
Another notable element about the prequels is that there's not much negative space in them. In
the original trilogy, there are multiple references to Ben Kenobi, to Anakin Skywalker, to the
Clone Wars, to the Old Republic, all of which created this vast, mysterious amount of negative
space for our imaginations to play in. Lucas may have built the playground, but the games we
played there were ours to dream up. In the prequels, it's all about Lucas doing a land grab, saying
"No no no, these are the answers to all the questions I posed to you guys back in the seventies!
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Now it’s time for me to answer all those questions. What? What do you mean, you want new
ones? No, let me tell you about these things called midichlorians…”
The inverse is true in the Twilight movies, which added negative space as they went along. The
original Twilight book and movie were basically about a whiny, teenage girl and her sparkly
vampire boyfriend. There was not much of a worldbuild, there was not much room to play in
there. The second one, New Moon, cracked that storyworld wide open by introducing a vast
history and conflict between the werewolves and the vampires. It became a much bigger world, a
much bigger playground for fans (also known as Twihards) to participate in, for their
imaginations to play in.
Frequently this strategy is used to add a sense of wonder and scale to a storyworld, but it can also
be used to drive narrative momentum. In Convergence Culture, Jenkins quotes media scholar
Mary Beth Haralovich and mathematician Michael W. Trosset: “Narrative pleasure stems from
the desire to know what will happen next, to have that gap opened and closed, again and again,
until the resolution of the story.”
149
Haralovich and Trosset are referring to the way TV shows
like Survivor rely on chance to keep audiences guessing, but the same idea can be easily
reapplied to the use of negative spaces in narratives. This is also in line with the “reader response’
school of literary theory, which posits that reading is far from a passive activity. As Janet
Murray writes in Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The pleasurable surrender of the mind to an imaginative world is often described,
in Coleridge’s phrase, as “the willing suspension of disbelief.” But this is too
passive a formulation even for traditional media. When we enter a fictional world,
we do not merely “suspend” a critical faculty; we also exercise a creative faculty.
We do not suspend disbelief so much as we actively create belief. Because of our
desire to experience immersion, we focus our attention on the enveloping world
and we use our intelligence to reinforce rather than question the reality of the
experience.
150

149
Jenkins 2006, p.28.
150
Murray 1997, p. 110.
Long 303
Many critics, Murray and Sara Gwenllian-Jones among them, liken this to a form of crafting
mental encyclopedias about the fictional worlds. As audiences consume multiple components of
a large narrative franchise, they construct vast databases of information in their minds to connect
each new piece with what they have experienced earlier. In her essay “Virtual Reality and Cult
Television”, Gwenllian-Jones describes how “the implicit aspects of the fictional world are, in
imagination, rendered explicit; gaps are filled in; inconsistencies are smoothed out by means of
plausible explanations that are in keeping with the interior logics of the fictional world; creative
interventions are made.”
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As Jenkins notes, “We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always
expands beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure
found in most classically constructed narratives, where we expect to leave the theatre knowing
everything that is required to make sense of a particular story.”
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The trick is to open up areas for audiences to fill the gaps with their own imaginations, but still
leave them curious enough to come back when the storyteller fills in those gaps herself. Of
course, she must also then provide a tale good enough - and riddled with enough new mysteries
and gaps - to keep those audiences coming back again and again for more. This is the aspect of
negative space and negative capability crucial to transmedia storytelling: how to provide hooks
for both the storyteller and the audience to return to later for another gripping tale.
There are many examples of contemporary storytellers using such negative spaces to great effect:
at the end of the TV series, Joss Whedon left Firefly fans wondering about the true story of
Reverend Book, exactly how the browncoats failed, and what horror had befallen poor River
Tam. Neil Gaiman's Sandman is full of negative space, hinting at the cause of Destruction's
departure, how Delight became Delirium, and how the family had lost the original Despair. And,
of course, perhaps the most famous example is how George Lucas used negative space with a
remarkably deft hand in his original Star Wars trilogy: how did Anakin Skywalker become Darth
Vader? What was the Old Republic? What were the Clone Wars? Who or what is Boba Fett, and

151
Gwenllion-Jones and Pearson 2004, p. 92.
152
Jenkins 2007.
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what's the story with that strange armor? All of these unanswered mysteries were opportunities
for new stories to be told, which Lucas then did quite profitably for decades.
Negative spaces and negative capability tie directly to Marc Ruppel's notion of migratory cues.
According to Ruppel, migratory cues are "a signal towards another medium – the means through
which various narrative paths are marked by an author and located by a user through activation
patterns".
153
While negative capability need not actually lead to anything at the moment in which
it's written into the story, it clears a space in the narrative for those cues to be planted. Ruppel
uses the letter in the Matrix franchise as a sample of a migratory cue – when it's mentioned at the
beginning of the second Matrix film, Ruppel argues that it exists as a hint for viewers to look for
more information on the letter in The Animatrix and Enter The Matrix.
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Yet a considerable
number of audience members watching that scene are unlikely to consume either of those two
pieces of media. Thanks to negative capability, the story continues to function without audience
members having experienced either the anime or the video game, as they can imagine their own
answer to the question of where exactly that letter came from. They retain the option to go and
track it down, and their understanding (and enjoyment) of the story would be increased by their
doing so. One possible way to merge these terminologies is to understand any reference to
external people, places or events as utilizing negative capability to craft potential migratory cues,
and become actualized as migratory cues when those extensions are made available.

153
Ruppel 2005.
154
Ibid.
Long 305
Experience Pathways
Got all that? That was a lot of jargon, but these are pretty straightforward (and useful) terms to
incorporate into your mental toolbox.
Imagine you’re setting off on a road trip. You've punched your desired destination into your GPS
and are zipping down the highway along your chosen route. As you whiz by exit after exit, you
might take notice of interesting-sounding roads or towns, and you might idly wonder what those
places are like. You don't take every exit and follow every road, but their very existence
promises that you're surrounded by interesting things that you could jump off and go explore if
you wanted to - and quite possibly might want to come back and explore later. Even if you
decide to not take any of those exits to other experiences, even if you decide to stay on the road
you’re on, you still enjoy the sense of being in a deeper, richer world.
Truly vast storyworlds are filled with such possible paths to take, or experience pathways. Much
like how roads connect a vast number of geographical locations on a map, so too do experience
pathways provide multiple ways for audiences to explore a transmedia storyworld. The course
you plotted out with your GPS is one experience pathway. The exit signs you see along the
highway are migratory cues, introducing you to opportunities to visit other interesting-sounding
places. Those places themselves are negative spaces for you until you visit them and fill them in,
so to speak. Until you do so, your imagination’s negative capability can sufficiently fill in that
gap without disrupting your current experience path.
The trick here, as both a narrative designer and a narrative architect, is to weave multiple
experience pathways into your storyworlds, and, even more importantly, to weave multiple types
of experience pathways into them in order to give audiences different ways to explore your
worlds.
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Four common types of experience pathways are time, locations, objects, and
characters.

155
Much more on this in the later section on “Collaborative Authorship”.
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Time
Time as an experience pathway is fairly straightforward - a timeline is a very simple path for
audiences to take, and gaps on that timeline are easy to create and fill in at any point during a
franchise’s lifespan.
In Star Wars, Obi-Wan’s “I fought with your father in the Clone Wars” enabled Lucas to slot
two animated miniseries, nine seasons of an animated TV series and a feature film of the Clone
Wars
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chronologically between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of
the Sith. However, the Clone Wars delivered not only significant revenue back to Lucasfilm, it
also delivered significant narrative value to the fans. To see just how much, we need to consider
a different major transmedia extension to Lucas’ storyworld.
In 1996, Lucasfilm launched Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, a multimedia project that fills in
the time between Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi that
spanned most of the ancillary media involved with a feature film without any actual feature film
at the center. The storylines in Steve Perry's novel, the Dark Horse comic from John Wagner and
Kilian Plunkett, and the video game from Lucasarts were largely complementary, but not
identical – with a few inconsistencies. Both the novel and the game are centered more around the
new characters Prince Xixor and Dash Rendar, whereas the comic is centered more around Boba
Fett, IG-88 and the other bounty hunters.
Shadows of the Empire demonstrates how not all negative spaces are created equal. In the case of
time, a major event or period of time can be imbued with more perceived value for the audience
than a minor one. Shadows of the Empire has weaker bonds to the rest of the franchise than
Clone Wars because it doesn't answer any major questions or explore any empty spaces opened
up in the original trilogy beyond a gap in time. Experiencing Shadows of the Empire is fun, but it
delivers little to no additional major story value to the overall experience – if you’ve played the

156
Gender Tartakovsky of Samurai Jack fame directed three seasons of Star Wars: Clone Wars between
2003 and 2005, Dave Filoni directed the theatrically-released Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2008, which
kicked off the five-season run of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV show, with a sixth airing first on
Netflix. A seventh season was in production when Lucasfilm announced the show would be “winding
down”, and in 2014 an initiative called “The Clone Wars Legacy” began adapting those episodes into
other formats.
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Shadows of the Empire game and read the Shadows of the Empire book and comics, you find out
how Boba Fett delivers the frozen-in-carbonite Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt and what the others
were doing during that time, but knowing this has little to no impact on how you understand or
enjoy the original movies, what Henry Jenkins calls additive comprehension.
157
(Shadows of the
Empire's most notable bit of additive comprehension was actually added later: the 1997 Special
Edition theatrical re-release of Episode IV: A New Hope added The Outrider, the ship captained
by Shadows the Empire’s original character Dash Rendar, into the background of the Mos Eisley
cantina. When Disney lobbed a thermal detonator into the Star Wars canon in 2014, wiping out
most of the “Expanded Universe”, it was widely accepted that Shadows of the Empire was one of
the victims of that purge – until Star Wars Celebration 2015, when an officially-sanctioned
interior model of The Outrider was exhibited,
158
inciting an all-new round of fan furor.) Shadows
of the Empire didn’t answer any burning questions that fans yearned to have answered, which,
from an increased energy, reduced friction and additive comprehension perspective, places it
narratively on par with a mediocre tie-in novel – albeit a very expensive and media-rich one.
In contrast, The Clone Wars focused on a much richer time in the storyworld’s history. When
Luke and Obi-Wan discuss the Clone Wars in Kenobi’s cave, they do so with a youth’s eager
curiosity and a veteran’s weariness, as if they were a grandfather and grandson discussing the
elder’s time in World War II or Vietnam. For this storyworld, the Clone Wars were a period of
great upheaval and adventure and danger. Perhaps most importantly, they were a period when
Obi-Wan and Luke’s father Anakin fought side-by-side, more like siblings than as master and
apprentice. Audiences had a taste of their relationship in Episode II: Attack of the Clones, but
Anakin’s eventual betrayal and turn to the dark side in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is vastly
more emotionally loaded for audiences who spent a hundred hours or so following Anakin and
Obi-Wan’s adventures. For those fans, both Episode III and Episode IV become much more
poignant. The Clone Wars simply meant more to both the world and the characters than the
period of time explored in Shadows of the Empire, and is thus more valuable to audiences as a
transmedia extension.

157
More on this in the next chapter.
158
Petty 2015.
Long 308

Locations
While humans seem to be intrinsically receptive to multiple stories about recurring characters
they like, location is criminally undervalued as an engine that can generate countless stories.
Many of the longest-running serialized stories in our culture are based on unique locations,
where some element of the location itself sets it up to host a huge, if not infinite, number of
stories.
If I keep returning to Star Wars, it’s because there are so many great case studies to be found
there. In the original Star Wars trilogy alone there are two locations that are jam-packed with
stories: the Mos Eisley cantina on Tattooine introduced in Episode IV and the desert palace of
Jabba the Hutt introduced in Episode VI. There are so many intriguing characters hanging
around in both of those places, and every single one of them has a story – many of which are to
be found in the Kevin J. Anderson-edited short story collections Tales from the Mos Eisley
Cantina (July 1995) and Tales from Jabba’s Palace (December 1995). Any place that a large
number of interesting characters gather repeatedly over multiple years can serve as a fantastic
story engine.
At a bigger scale, consider NBC's medical drama ER, which premiered in 1994 and ran for 15
seasons. The secret of ER's success is in large part due to its setting - the emergency room of the
fictional County General Hospital in Chicago. It's impossible to truly know if the novelist
Michael Crichton suspected when he created the show that it would last for a whopping 331
episodes, becoming the longest-running American primetime medical drama in American
television history, but his storyteller's instinct was dead on. An emergency room has tons of
inherent tension and literal life-or-death situations experienced by a large cast of doctors, patients,
and medical staff – a great combination to ensure an almost endless supply of very human stories.
The show did suffer a relatively high turnover rate of actors and actresses – not a single member
of the show's original cast made it all the way through to the end of the series - but again, an
emergency room also experiences similar turnover rates, another reason such a setting can be
such a fantastic story generator.
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A location's unique mood or atmosphere can also be a key generator of multiple stories set in the
same location. Remedy's 2010 title Alan Wake was a very Twin Peaks-esque survival horror
game for Windows and the Xbox 360. The Alan Wake game told the story of the titular horror
novelist Alan Wake and his own nightmarish experience in the eerie Pacific Northwest town of
Bright Falls, and its spooky David Lynch-meets-Stephen King mood was one of the title's main
selling points. To capture this vibe and hook potential buyers, Microsoft Studios devised a
marketing campaign featuring a webisode series called Bright Falls – which didn't include Alan
Wake at all, but instead featured another writer, journalist Jake Fischer, on his own earlier visit
to the town and his (mis)adventures there. As in Alan Wake, the town itself, and its unearthly
atmosphere, is the true centerpiece of the webisodes, and could theoretically have functioned as
the setting for countless other stories.
The list of long-running series centered around a particular location is impressive. Consider
Cheers, NBC's sitcom set in a Boston bar that ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993, or
M*A*S*H, CBS' medical dramedy (and transmedia story, given its origins in the 1970 film of the
same name) about the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu, South Korea during
the Korean War, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1972 until 1983. Eleven seasons are
impressive, and ER's 15 seasons may have been recordbreaking for prime time medical dramas,
but these pale in comparison to ABC's daytime soap opera General Hospital, which premiered
on April 1, 1963 and is still on the air. As of this writing, not only is General Hospital at 54
seasons (and almost 5500 episodes!) the longest-running serial produced in Hollywood and the
longest-running entertainment program in ABC television history, it also holds the record for
most Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series and has, over the years, spawned no
less than four spinoffs.
A different, yet also extremely powerful, way of thinking about locations as story engines is to
think about unfinished maps. Unexplored territories are great negative spaces for audiences to
wonder about. One of my favorite long-running transmedia franchises is Stargate, which began
as Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s feature film in 1994 and then made the jump to
television as Stargate: SG-1 in 1997. Stargate: SG-1 proved so popular that it ran for 10 seasons
and spawned three spinoff series, the animated series Stargate: Infinity (2002-2003) and the live-
action series Stargate: Atlantis (2004-2009) and Stargate: Universe (2009-2011), as well as two
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direct-to-DVD feature films, Stargate: The Ark of Truth (March 2008) and Stargate: Continuum
(July 2008); and numerous video games, including the (sadly cancelled) MMORPG Stargate
Worlds. Anything that can support that many stories has to have one heck of a story generator at
its heart, and Stargate’s is a doozy: an ancient, giant stone ring turned up on its side that could be
“dialed”, much like an enormous rotary telephone, to a huge number of “gate addresses”. Once
an address was properly locked, the gate opens up a small, contained wormhole – which leads to
another gate somewhere else in the universe that corresponds to the dialed gate address. As story
generators go, this one was magnificent – the equivalent of considering every entry in a phone
book another story to tell (which, I suppose, isn’t far from the truth).

Objects
Another possible tactic for linking disparate storylines together that is less common, although
perhaps no less powerful, is found in storied objects. A unique object can be the heart of a really
great story, as evidenced by such classics as Dashiell Hammett's noir detective story The Maltese
Falcon or W. W. Jacobs’ horrific The Monkey's Paw. When that artifact passes from owner to
owner, giving rise to multiple adventures as it goes, then it becomes an experience pathway for
audiences to follow.
A common form of this type of storytelling is a legendary weapon. In the original 1980s
storyworld for Mattel's Masters of the Universe toy-centric franchise, the Sword of Power is the
key to Castle Grayskull and the ultimate power protected within. To ensure balance, the sword
was split into two – one half possessed by the heroic He-Man and the other possessed by the
villainous Skeletor, which made the Sword of Power into a basic MacGuffin: Skeletor was
always trying to obtain He-Man's half of the Power Sword so he could steal the ultimate power,
and He-Man was always keeping the sword (and the ultimate power) away from the villain. In
the 2002 reimagining of the franchise, a new intergenerational emphasis is placed on the
mythology behind the Sword of Power. In this version, the sword was originally a simple
weapon wielded by King Grayskull, a barbarian king of legend. Upon Grayskull's death, his
power was transferred into the sword, which was then became a magical weapon passed down
from hero to hero, transforming multiple would-be heroes into multiple versions of He-Man over
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the years. In 2013, a collector's club exclusive figure depicted He-Man as an elderly king for the
first time, ruling over the land and wielding a battered, weathered and worn version of the sword,
and another figure of the character’s son as a futuristic hero wields a more cosmic version of the
Power Sword, but it is certainly recognizable as the sword.
Other storyworlds that feature a legendary weapon as a connecting vector for experience paths
are Star Wars, when Obi-Wan Kenobi gives Luke Skywalker the lightsaber that had belonged to
Luke’s father; David Petersen’s Mouse Guard, where multiple generations of heroic mice have
taken up both the weapon and the name of The Black Axe; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where
multiple generations of vampire slayers have wielded a legendary scythe (which, in this author’s
opinion, looks more like a battle-ax with a stake at the end).
Another, more romantic and perhaps more literary example of this kind of object-centric
storytelling is François Girard's 1998 film The Red Violin. The film begins at an auction in
present-day Montreal where the titular instrument, a famous pure-red Nicolo Bussotti violin, is
up for auction. As the auction continues, the violin's tale unfolds through a series of flashbacks,
beginning with its creation in 17th century Italy, on to an 18th century Austrian monastery, 19th
century Oxford, China during the Cultural Revolution. As the red violin passes from owner to
owner, it inspires passion – and sultry tales of passion – at each stop along its way.
Yet another type of legendary artifact is a legendary steed or other vehicle. In Star Wars, this is
the Millennium Falcon, whose ability to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs is
legendary.
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Imagine the tales the Millennium Falcon could tell from before Han Solo won it off
of Lando Calrissian. Who built it? Where did it come from? Who was the first to convert it into a
smuggling ship, or was it always designed as such?

Characters
After time, characters must be the most common type of experience pathways. Not every
character is compelling enough to warrant a spinoff, and some popular characters (such as Joey
Tribbiani from Friends) function better as part of an ensemble cast than as a leading character in

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Not least for the ship’s apparent ability to convert units of distance into units of time, but I digress.
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their own right, but many major transmedia franchises spin off stories, and occasionally full
subfranchises, around secondary characters.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, which ran from 1997 until 2003, spun off another TV
show starring Buffy's brooding vampire-with-a-soul love interest Angel in 1999 – which briefly
outlasted its parent show, ending in 2004. Buffy's canonical jump to comics with Dark Horse
Comics' 2007 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 proved so successful (as of this writing,
they're on Season 10) that a similar "sixth season" comic series for Angel was launched in 2007
by IDW Comics, ran until the rights were transferred to Dark Horse in 2008, and was then
relaunched as Dark Horse's own ongoing series Angel and Faith in 2011. Willow: Wonderland,
a five-issue, in-continuity comic miniseries starring Buffy's witchy best friend was published by
Dark Horse from November 2012 until March 2013, and Spike: Into the Light, a one-shot,
(mostly) in-continuity graphic novel starring Buffy's long-time frenemy was published by Dark
Horse in July 2014.
Several great examples can also be found in Doctor Who. As I mentioned in the earlier section
on Extensible Narrative Architecture, Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) was first introduced a
companion for the third incarnation of Doctor Who in 1973, continued traveling with the Third
Doctor and then the Fourth Doctor through 1976, and continued to make recurring guest
appearances until the actress' passing in 2011. Sarah Jane's first flirtation with a spinoff was in
the 1981 pilot for K-9 and Company, which was built primarily around the Doctor's robotic dog
K-9, but she later starred in her own kid-friendly spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures, which ran
from 2007-2011. Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) debuted in the 2005 episode "The
Empty Child", briefly traveled with the Ninth Doctor, and then went on to anchor the more adult-
themed Torchwood from 2006-2011, with guest appearances on the main show in 2007 and 2008.
Ubisoft’s approach in building subfranchises around their historical assassins is legendary (see
the earlier chapter on Extensible Narrative Architecture), but Ubisoft also took a somewhat
counterintuitive approach to building out other secondary characters, introducing them first as
stars in ancillary media and later weaving then into the games. In 2010, Ubisoft and WildStorm
Comics debuted Assassin's Creed: The Fall, a three-issue comic miniseries that introduced the
Russian Assassin Nikolai Orelov and his tragic, present-day, Assassin-turned-Templar
descendant Daniel Cross, also known as Subject Four. Cross would first appear in-game in
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2011's Assassin's Creed II: Revelations, after which Cross and Orelov's tale continued into a
second graphic novel, Assassin's Creed: The Chain, published by Ubiworkshop in the summer of
2012. Cross' tale reached its tragic conclusion in Assassin's Creed III, released on October 30,
2012.
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Another example of this is the Chinese Assassin Shao Jun, who first appears in the 2011
animated short film Assassin’s Creed: Embers, an extension of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, as
well as Oliver Bowden’s novelization of the game (the novelization of the short film is included
at the end of the book). In 2015, Shao Jun reappears as the protagonist of the 2.5-D
downloadable game Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, which is set two years after the events
in Embers.
For Halo, 343 Industries adopted a similar, if more strategic, tactic with Captain Thomas Lasky,
a relatively recent addition to the storyworld. Lasky is introduced through the Halo tie-in novels,
with his first passing mention in "Petra," a short story included in the 2010 reissue of Christopher
Schlerf's Halo: First Strike, and his first full appearance in Karen Traviss' 2012 novel Halo: The
Thursday War. Lasky next appears as a main character in the live-action webisode series Halo:
Forward Unto Dawn, which premiered online on October 5th, 2012. Forward Unto Dawn is set
during Lasky's days as a cadet at the Corbulo Academy of Military Science, and concludes with
his first encounter with main Halo protagonist Master Chief (aka John-117) during the Battle of
Circinius IV. Lasky first appears in-game as a main character in Halo 4, where he is commander
of the UNSC Infinity, the experimental flagship of the UNSC Navy that rescues Master Chief at
the beginning of the game (which serves as the inciting incident for much of the rest of the
game's story).
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Modularity
Keep in mind that each individual component of your transmedia storyworld, from start to finish,
is itself its own experience path. This concept is called modularity.

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http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Daniel_Cross
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http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Thomas_Lasky
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In essence, a transmedia storyworld is made up of story modules, or smaller pieces that are
enjoyable on their own, but combine into something greater when taken together. Every book is
its own single experience, every comic is its own single experience, every game is its own single
experience… Every component needs to be awesome and deeply engaging in its own right, so
that if an audience member experiences that piece, they’re sufficiently delighted and hooked that
they want to explore more of the storyworld, without feeling dissatisfied. Remember – every
component of your storyworld is someone’s first point of contact with it. This means that your
storyworld is, arguably, only as good as its weakest link.
This may seem hard to do well in serialized narratives. How can issue #3 out of a 5-issue limited
series of comics stand on its own? One solution: consider the embedded clues in the paratexts,
which are the additional media that surround the central media component. In television, these
are the “previously on” scenes and (sometimes) the “next time on” scenes that precede and
follow a highly serialized episode. Comics have been adopting a similar tactic with “previously”
introductory, scene-setting text inside the front cover, which is sometimes accompanied by a
character list as well. Such paratexts provide clues that our issue #3 is part of a larger whole, but
they also provide just enough context to help this single component, this single module, to be
enjoyable on its own.

Key Takeaways
A storyteller looking to build a successful transmedia storyworld should:
• include negative spaces for her audience to fill in using their own imaginations,
• incorporate migratory cues to guide audiences to extensions that fill in those
spaces, and
• craft multiple experience pathways for audiences to pursue, explore and enjoy.

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Action: Evaluating Experience Pathways and Modularity
1. Choose a storyworld for evauation. How does the audience discover that its
extensions exist? Is it through some external content discovery or
recommendation system, like the user interface of Netflix or the iTunes Store? Or
is through something in the content itself?
2. What if the audience member is more intrigued by a particular character in the
universe, and just wants to experience everything there is to experience about that
character? How do they do that, and what do they find?
3. What artifacts in the storyworld are particularly legendary?
4. What places in the storyworld have a thousand stories to tell? What are those
legends and stories?
5. What are the paths that an interested audience member takes to track down each
of these stories, and use to navigate through the vast transmedia storyworld?

Action: Creating Experience Pathways and Modularity
1. What are several different pathways your audiences might take through your
storyworld?
2. If you have an audience member who’s interested in the history of your
storyworld, what clues about that history have you planted for them to wonder
about?
3. What aspects of your characters hint at something in their past? What in their
appearance, movements, or attitudes hint at stories they would never tell anyone?
What might hint at stories they’d jump at the first chance to tell?
4. What areas have you left uncharted on the maps of your storyworld, and where
have you scribbled, “Here there be dragons”?
5. What objects in your storyworld have been passed down from generation to
generation, or have otherwise changed hands repeatedly? Did their owners part
with them willingly? What impact did each owner have on the object? What
impact did the object have on them?
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6. Update your story in your NDD accordingly. Enter your plan for multiple
experience pathways into section 3.5 of your NDD.

Example: Multiple Experience Pathways, Negative Space, Migratory Cues and
Modularity in Spookshow
When I first conceived of Spookshow, I knew that I wanted to have three distinct but connected
stories. These became Casey’s story in 1928, The Great Casey Smith; Shade’s story in 1921, The
Great Wilderness; and Casey’s parents’ story in 1917, The Great Disaster.
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the narrative design I concocted for Spookshow set up a
mystery in each chapter of the animated series which was then answered in-depth in the
extension in comics or novellas that directly followed, and then answered again in the
subsequent episode of the animated series at a more superficial level. In this way, the animated
series and its extensions were sufficiently modular to be experienced individually, but the overall
experience was better when they were experienced together.
As the story evolved and I began to think through how I wanted to interleave the episodes with
the books and comics, I realized that those three names – The Great Casey Smith, The Great
Wilderness, and The Great Disaster – were a better match for the three areas of the narrative, not
the particular components. The animated series was The Great Casey Smith, as it followed
Casey’s arc. The books emerged as being all focused on the lead-up to, and the secret causes
behind, the casting of the spell that transformed the Western United States, so the books were
The Great Disaster. The comics all focused on how people reacted to the Great Disaster,
particularly those characters in the world that set out to explore the newly-created magical
frontier, so the comics became The Great Wilderness. Both of these extension series are first
introduced in the main animated series through negative spaces –the Great Wilderness is
introduced as a location-based negative space, a mysterious place on the map, and the Great
Disaster is introduced as an event-based negative space, a mysterious place on the timeline.
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As this architecture began to emerge, I looked for ways to stitch the chapters in each medium
together. The animated series was already designed for linear progression, so one experience
pathway was for the audience to simply follow Casey’s adventure through the show’s 13
episodes. The thematic unity of the books and the thematic unity of the comics meant that
audiences could also simply read all the books, or read all the comics, and have rewarding
experiences as well, so those became two additional experience pathways. The fourth, most
powerful experience pathway – of course – remained the animation-comic-animation-book-
animation-comic (etc.) pathway that is the default Spookshow experience.
Much like the relationship between Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures,
Spookshow’s primary experience pathways are character-based. A character is introduced in an
episode of the show, with some inherent mystery (what is Ricardo Espinosa searching for? What
is the true nature of Robin McCloud?) and then an extension will fill in precisely those gaps.
Sometimes a secondary mystery is introduced in one extension and then followed up in another;
for example, when Creepy and Gears are first introduced in the animated series in 1928, they’re
romantic partners. However, in the first comic extension in 1921 (The Haunting of Sebastian
Shade), they can’t stand each other. This poses the question of how they went from enemies to
lovers, which is answered in the next comic in the series (The Inventor’s Heart).
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9. Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances
Medium specificity is the concept that every medium has its own particular characteristics,
or affordances, that enable the medium to function differently from other media. For
example, television and film are both combinations of imagery, motion, sound, dialogue,
cinematography and so on, but seriality is considered a more central affordance of
television than film, because even film series as consistent and dense as the Marvel
Cinematic Universe still release their components at much greater intervals than television
series. Taking those particular characteristics into account when designing a story or story
component for that particular medium is the art of leveraging affordances.
Leveraging affordances can be a useful technique for lowering transmedia resistance
because, as described in the Wolverine and Nightcrawler example in ‘extensible character
design’ above, many audiences can be motivated to follow a storyworld into another
medium to see how that storyworld is interpreted in that medium. The more thoughtfully
the medium’s affordances are married to the characteristics of the storyworld, the better –
the 8-bit Sunsoft Batman video game was a fairly generic side-scrolling run-and-jump game
‘skinned’ with a Batman theme, but Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum games for the
Sony PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 or the Xbox 360 and Xbox One put more effort into
creating what came to be called a “Batman simulator” by many critics, paying attention to
how the character moved and, through the addition of a “Detective Mode,” how Batman
saw the world.
Note that this is a double-edged sword. Just because a medium can do something other
media cannot does not mean that every work in that medium must use that affordance. 3-D
movies can create the illusion that something is leaping off of the screen, but that particular
trick is so overused that the cliché of it is detrimental to the flow of a story experience like
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

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In the same way that a storyteller working in comics should carefully consider both text and
imagery in the crafting of her story, and a storyteller working in film should consider dialogue,
imagery, motion, sound, and cinematography, so too should a transmedia storyteller consider the
strengths, weaknesses and unique opportunities of each medium being used over the course of
her story, and how to combine those aspects to best effect. The strategy builds off of the notion
of “affordances” as described in industrial designer Donald A. Norman’s classic The Design of
Everyday Things:
There already exists the start of a psychology of materials and of things, the study
of affordances of objects. When used in this sense, the term affordance refers to
the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental
properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair
affords (is for) support and, therefore, affords sitting… Plates are for pushing.
Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or
bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do
just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction is inquired.
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When we talk about the affordances of media, we similarly mean the unique characteristics of
each medium that determine how it functions. For example, the novel is primarily a textual,
linguistic medium, and thus relies more heavily on the human imagination to fill in the textures
and details of its contents than film, which is (obviously) a more audiovisual medium. (In
McLuhanian terms, the novel is considered a “cooler” medium, and film is a “hotter” medium,
based on the amount of imaginative energy, or labor, that the audience has to invest into the
experience.) This concept, that every medium has its own particular unique characteristics to be
deployed in each work in that medium, is known as medium specificity.
While the term 'transmedia' originated with Marsha Kinder at the University of Southern
California's School of Cinematic Arts, it should come as no surprise that some of the earliest
dedicated academic study of transmedia storytelling came out of Henry Jenkins and William
Uricchio's Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Treating media studies in a fashion similar to comparative literature studies allows scholars and

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Norman 2002.
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storytellers alike to get at the heart of how different media work and what different media do well
by comparing and contrasting them against one another. Once we understand what those
differences are, we can be more strategic in how transmedia experiences are built by taking
advantage of the strengths each medium included in the overall experience has to offer.
Transmedia storyteller and theorist Tyler Weaver draws upon his background in music
composition to draw a very astute metaphor:
Tone color is the specific sound capabilities of each instrument. You must know
the strengths and weaknesses of each instrument to write them in such a way that
produces the best blend of sound and color. Blend poorly, and you get a
cacophony of crap. Blend them well, and you get Ravel. And so it is with
transmedia. Instead of violins or violas, drums, or marimbas, we’re composing
with media.
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Weaver lists some affordances for some of the most popular media, with the caveat that “I don’t
intend for these listed items to be the end-all, be-all statement of ‘this is what this medium is
good for.’ I view these as the best practices, a foundation on which you can build”. Weaver
continues:
Film – You can’t beat the cinematic experience. But from a storytelling
perspective, films are primarily based in action. What does a character do? Many
films take the popular “two people talking” method, which goes against the very
grain of what makes film film. As Alfred Hitchcock said of the advent of the
“talkies,” “these things are just pictures of people talking.”
Games – You are the protagonist. You are sucked into a world that you must
make better by your own actions. The world created by the developers may be
massively immersive, letting you peer through newspapers, audio recordings, or
all sorts of things. The time you spend in that world is greatly increased too as
exploration is the key here. Or, they can be simple, casual affairs. There’s a wide

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Weaver 2013, pp. 28-29.
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range of uses and types of games, and you have to pick the one that’s right for the
story, or stay away.
Novels and Prose – What people think. Freedom of structure. Zero budget
considerations (in the storytelling part of it anyhow). A personal connection and
experience for the reader, as your work is being held in their hands.
Television – The heir apparent to serialized novels and immersion. Character-
driven with ample time for the audience to get to know these characters. One
welcomes your characters into their homes each and every week. Long-form
serialized stories can mix with episodic, “done-in-one” tales with an overarching
scene/mystery.
Web Series – The low-budget, immediate, consume-when-you-want cousin to
television. If television is the heir apparent to Dickensian serialization, web serials
are the penny dreadful heir apparent. They’re accessible anywhere with an
Internet connection, and can foster extreme audience interaction and devotion
thanks to the comment fields. […]
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Social Media – Immediacy, back and forth dialog. Engagement.
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Weaver’s list is a decent starting point, but as he himself readily admits, it’s far from exhaustive.
Here are few additional affordances to consider for each of these media.

Film
Film can be considered as text plus images plus motion, with the eventual addition of sound and
cinematography, or how each shot is composed and, as per Sergei Eisenstein's concept of
montage, juxtaposed with one another in sequence.
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Films:

164
Weaver glosses over comics in this list because it’s the focus of the rest of his book.
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Weaver 2013, pp. 29-30.
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Eisenstein 1977.
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• Make excellent tentpole experiences. When considering a transmedia franchise plan,
films are frequently featured as the central “tentpole” experiences anchoring a number of
other media extensions, as in Star Wars or the case study on The Matrix described earlier
in Part I.
• Can be gender-balanced. When considering what demographics your storyworld is
designed to attract, in the US and Canada both men and women enjoy films, and
(obviously) frequently enjoy going to films together. According to the Motion Picture
Association of America's 2016 Theatrical Market Statistics report, "The gender
composition of moviegoers (people who went to a movie at the cinema at least once in
the year) in 2016 skewed slightly towards women, similar to the composition of the
overall population. As in previous years, tickets sold continue to be split evenly among
genders." 'Slightly' in this case is a difference of 4%: 52% female to 48% male.
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• Are enjoyed both in groups and individually. Going to the movies can be an extremely
social experience, with large groups of friends all going to the same screening of a film
together, or they can be enjoyed privately and individually in the viewer’s own home.
• Can generate a wide possible audience. If your franchise plan has a large enough
marketing budget, the potential audience for a film is vast. Again, according to the
MPAA's 2016 Theatrical Market Statistics report, 71% of the North American population
age 2 or older – 246 million people – "went to a movie in the cinema at least once in
2016",
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and that's without factoring in the number of people who watched a movie at
home. Keep in mind that the marketing budget required to generate such a large turnout
can frequently rival the budget for making the film!
• Can be shown in a controlled location. Having an audience read a book or a comic in
one particular venue is rare (with, of course, the exception of staged readings or special
events). Films, on the other hand, have historically opened first in theatrical environments,
and some of those environments can be customized to match the film being shown. For
example, the film component of Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory was initially only
viewable at the World of Coca-Cola location in Atlanta, Georgia. Disney’s El Capitan
theater in Los Angeles regularly hosts special additional experiences prior to the

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MPAA 2016.
168
MPAA 2016.
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screening of a film, and an increasing number of “4D” theaters augment the viewing
experience with special physical effects like moving seats or spritzes of water.
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• Can be shown at a controlled time (event). A film screening can also be an event in and
of itself. Since 2007, Fabien Riggall’s Secret Cinema has hosted live experiences
centered around fan-favorite films. Secret Cinema describes these as “360-degree
participatory Secret Worlds where the boundaries between performer and audience, set
and reality are constantly shifting”,
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where “you can live and become part of your most
loved films where we never reveal the location or the details of the experience”
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beforehand. As of this writing, Secret Cinema’s screenings have included Moulin Rouge,
The Empire Strikes Back, Ghostbusters, Lawrence of Arabia, and Back to the Future. For
a screening of Dirty Dancing, attendees…arrived at a custom built holiday camp in east
London dressed in full period costumes. […] They took dance lessons, played lawn
games, and snacked in the “staff quarters.” They watched the movie at the end of the
evening, many quoting lines alongside the actors on the big screen. [The event] was so
popular it pushed Dirty Dancing back into the U.K. box office top 10, nearly 30 years
after it was first released.
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• Can vary in cost from super-low budget to extremely expensive. Transmedia
storytellers interested in incorporating films into their projects should be aware that
movies can be prohibitively expensive to produce, with Guillermo del Toro’s 2017
Oscar-winning The Shape of Water costing “only” $19.5 million to produce. Compared to
the $55M budget for his 2015 film Crimson Peak or the $180M budget for his 2013 film
Pacific Rim, that’s a bargain – but it’s still out of reach for many indie filmmakers.
However, creative filmmakers can produce amazing works for a fraction of those
numbers – Kevin Smith’s 1994 film Clerks was famously produced for only $27,575, and
the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project was shot for around $25,000.
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In 2004, Primer

169
According to my friend Francesca Marie Smith, during one particularly gory scene the 4D theater
sprayed her with water “blood”. That’s one level of “immersion” I could do without.
170
http://www.secretcinema.org/about
171
http://www.secretcinema.org/sc-presents
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Kottasova 2016.
173
Law 2015.
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was produced for only $7,000, the same amount that, according to his book Rebel
Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez spent filming El Mariachi.
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• Can potentially deliver a deeper, quicker emotional attachment to characters with
live actors than with digital ones. I’ll say right up front that this last one is highly
debatable. In 2009 Ubisoft made a very interesting move with the transmedia extensions
for Assassin’s Creed II. As described earlier, Assassin’s Creed II is a story about Ezio, an
assassin in Renaissance-era Italy, but the “beating human heart” at the core of the story is
Ezio’s desire for revenge. Within the first few scenes of the game’s story, Ezio’s family
is almost completely wiped out or kidnapped by the villainous Templars. Although it’s
easy to sympathize with Ezio – no one would enjoy having their family wiped out or
kidnapped by Templars – the emotional investment is weakened somewhat because we
don’t know these fallen characters. When a character is extinguished in Game of Thrones,
we’re often much more sympathetic with those hell-bent on avenging that character
because we ourselves have come to be emotionally attached to that character. (Well,
maybe not so much in Joffrey’s case – but I digress.) To heighten the emotional gut-
punch of losing Ezio’s family, Ubisoft decided to produce a prequel miniseries called
Assassin’s Creed: Lineage that focused on Ezio’s father and the rest of his family. By
spending more time with those characters, it made their loss that much more visceral –
but Ubisoft went one step further. Instead of producing the prequel miniseries as games,
comics or animation, they produced it as a live-action series. Having the characters be
depicted as real-life people instead of digital cartoons, at some level, made them feel that
much more real, and their losses that much more poignant. Now, like I said, this is
debatable – few would argue that cartoon characters are incapable of provoking
emotional responses by viewers (anyone who’s seen Toy Story 3 would quickly puncture
that argument), but the ability of humans to identify with other real humans is a factor
that transmedia storytellers should at least take into consideration when weighing film or
television as an option.

174
Rodriguez 1995.
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Claudia Ferri as Ezio’s mother Maria Auditore in Assassin’s Creed: Lineage.

Video Games
The primary differentiating affordance of games is interactivity. Games:
• Enable players to embody the characters. Books offer a high degree of insight or
interiority into a character's innermost thoughts, but games allow their players a sense of
how the character moves and acts. Multiple critics referred to Rocksteady Studios’ 2009
Batman: Arkham Asylum as a ‘Batman simulator’ because of how embodied the
gameplay was, ranging from the game’s unique “Detective Mode” that allowed players to
see the world the way Batman, the “world’s greatest detective,” would, to the
comparatively slow but powerful way the character moved on the ground. As the website
GeekSyndicate wrote, “It’s not a superhero game, nor is it a game. It’s a Batman
simulator. I didn’t feel like I was playing as Batman. I felt like I was Batman.”
175

175
http://geeksyndicate.co.uk/reviews/review-batman-arkham-asylum-xbox360/
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• Are (moderately) gender-balanced as a medium. According to the Entertainment
Software Association’s 2017 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game
Industry report, the game-playing community is made up of 59% men and 41% women.
Interestingly enough, according to the survey “the average gamer is 35 years old. Women
age 18 and over represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population
[31%] than boys under 18 [18%].”
176

177 ⁠
• Much like films, can vary in cost from super-low budget to extremely expensive.
Games can be produced by tiny teams, as evidenced by the stories of Super Meat Boy or
Fez in Indie Game: the Movie, or by huge international teams, as with Halo or Assassin's
Creed. As such, they can be produced on virtually nonexistent budgets in the developers'
spare time or at costs that rival Hollywood blockbusters. Once upon a time, the
distribution channels tended to be divided by budget: tiny indie games were relegated to

176
ESA 2017, p. 4.
177
http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/EF2017_FinalDigital.pdf
Long 328
online downloads for computers while consoles were only accessible to bigger-budget
studios. Digital distribution via Steam or Apple's App Store, coupled with more
accessible professional tools like Unity, are blowing those distinctions apart. There are
still significant hurdles involved – getting a game as an app onto an iPhone still requires
certification, for example, and the death of Adobe Flash was a hit to indie game
developers – but games still represent a fantastically broad opportunity.
178

• Can generate a wide possible audience, although frequently sliced by platform.
According to the ESA, 47% of American adult men surveyed "often/sometimes" play
games on a computer, TV, game console or portable device (such as a phone), and 39%
of American adult women. Given that there were nearly 325MM Americans in 2017,
179

that's a very large potential market – but any expectations should be tempered by an
awareness of the install base for the target platform. For example, as of February 2018,
the top 25 bestselling consoles in North America are as follows (numbers in millions):
•
Nintendo DS 57.39
Sony PlayStation 2 53.65
Microsoft Xbox 360 49.11
Nintendo Wii 45.51
Nintendo Game Boy 43.18
Nintendo Game Boy Advance 40.39
Sony PlayStation 38.94

178
Note that this is just describing digital video games. Board games are a largely underutilized channel
for transmedia extensions, and digital download systems like DriveThruRPG.com are a great way to get
such extensions out into the wild.
179
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/
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Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) 33.49
Sony PlayStation 3 29.42
Sony PlayStation 4 26.01
Atari 2600 23.54
Nintendo 3DS 23.24
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) 22.88
Microsoft Xbox One 22.84
Sony PlayStation Portable 21.41
Nintendo 64 20.11
Sega Genesis 16.98
Microsoft Xbox 15.77
Nintendo GameCube 12.55
Nintendo Wii U 6.23
Nintendo Switch 6.14
Sega GameGear 5.4
Sega Dreamcast 3.9
Sony PlayStation Vita 2.55
Sega Saturn 1.83

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Making matters even hairier, the top 9 of these are discontinued. The only platforms currently
being actively developed and promoted by their manufacturers are the Microsoft Xbox One, the
Sony PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS.

Text and Print
One of the oldest media, the written word, offers a wide range of affordances and opportunities.
Text, particularly in print:
• Uses the reader's imagination to create highly customized, intimate experiences. In a
McLuhanian sense, textual storytelling is a “cool” medium, which means that the
audience does more work in imagining what the characters look like – and, in this case,
sound like. This means that readers’ imaginations inherently customize the stories to the
readers’ own personal preference, as they fill in those gaps. This personalization
heightens their individual engagement with the story. This may, perhaps, be why the
book will almost always be better than the movie.
• Lends itself to internal dialogue and conflict, especially with first-person narrators.
One of my favorite recent examples of this is in Jonathan Stroud's YA supernatural
adventure series Lockwood and Company, where our narrator Lucy Carlyle is a young
woman locked in constant battle with both the ghosts haunting London and her increasing
romantic interest in her boss, the titular Anthony Lockwood. The spectacular spooky,
ghostly elements would lend themselves well to more visual media like comics, film or
television – but it's Lucy's particular perspective, voice, and her internal struggle with her
feelings for Lockwood that makes Stroud's books soar.
• Can be affordable to produce. Text is an extremely cheap mode of storytelling, perhaps
now more than ever before. Authoring and self-publishing an e-book via services like
those offered by Amazon, Apple or Barnes & Noble is now a comparatively simple and
straightforward process, and amplifies another affordance: heightened creative control for
the author. A single individual can write, illustrate, lay out, and publish an entire book
Long 331
essentially all by themselves, wielding complete creative freedom – albeit within the
limitations of the platform.
• Can make beautiful physical objects. Textual storytelling can be a very tactile, tangible
art form when actual ink and paper are involved. Consider such beautiful "art book"
objects like those produced by McSweeney’s. Slim volumes, fat volumes, tiny volumes,
enormous volumes, mass releases, one-offs – the range of possibilities for books is
spectacular.
• Lends itself well to experimentation. There are a wide range of new features coming to
e-books and book-like apps – for example, the breathtaking Cornelia Funke's
MirrorWorld app from the bestselling author and Mirada
180
– but experimentation with
text-centric experiences is in no way limited to digital media. On January 26, 2018,
author and self-declared "media inventor" Robin Sloan launched "Penumbra's New
Fiction" with The Unbeatable Deck of Ronan Shin, written by Kiyash Monsef and
illustrated by Helen Shewolfe Tseng. In the announcement email, Sloan wrote perhaps
my favorite storyteller-artist's description of playing with the power of print:
As you'll see when you visit the website, Penumbra's New Fiction is available
in exactly two formats:
Printed by you, on paper
Printed by me, here in the Murray Street Media Lab on a machine called a
Risograph, mailed to you in an envelope
Yes, this means there's no option to read the story in your browser. This is by
design. In 2018, all media struggles to stand apart from the flood, in social
media feeds and browser tabs. But it's my opinion that fiction suffers the most
in this environment. There is tons of terrific short fiction on the web, but –
again, just my opinion – a browser window isn't a sturdy enough bubble to
support the fleeting dream-state that fiction requires.

180
http://mirada.com/stories/mirrorworld
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So, because I am always, ALWAYS up for an experiment, I decided to try
something different.
Now, a word about the Risograph, It's a mutant, full-color mimeograph
machine, designed for use in schools and small business – a really cheap way
to make a bunch of copies. It uses soy ink! […] In the 2000s, Risographs were
(re)discovered by artists, and now you see amazing, colorful Riso work all
over the place. Ever since my first encounter, I've found the machine's output
captivating. It's artful and surprising, with some of the same potential as
silkscreen processes, but also mechanical, practical, unfussy.
These words happen to describe my vision for the print edition of Penumbra's
New Fiction. I am engineering it, also, around lightness: so it can be carried to
you by a single first-class stamp. […]
The first production run was a bit fraught, and I learned some lessons about,
uh, paper. And ink. (Materials! Who knew!) But the result is terrific: simple,
comfortable, human – an 11x17 edition with the potential, I hope, to engross.
And if you see a smudge or a wrinkle, well that's because I made them all
myself, with my own two hands.
There are 1000 copies of the Risograph edition available for less than a dollar
each, and infinitely more of the print-it-yourself edition at the cost of a little
ink.
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• A fairly niche market (?). Storytellers building worlds primarily to entertain may have
reason to be concerned: according to a 2016 Pew Research study in 2016, the median
American reads only four books a year:
•
Median Mean
Total 4 12

181
Sloan 2018.
Long 333
Men 3 9
Women 5 15
White, non-Hispanic 5 14
Black, non-Hispanic 1 6
18-29 5 12
30-49 4 12
50-64 3 11
65+ 3 13
Less than high school 0 3
High school grad 2 9
Some college 4 12
College+ 7 17
Below $30,000 2 10
$30,000-$49,999 4 12
$50,000-$74,999 5 13
$75,000+ 5 14
Urban 4 11
Suburban 3 12
Rural 4 12
⁠1

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182

However, according to the MPAA's 2016 report cited earlier in the Film section,
"the typical moviegoer bought 5.3 tickets over the course of the year," only seeing
one more movie (OK, fine, 1.3 more) than reading of books. Further, according to
the same report, 71% of American adults went to the movies at least once in that
year versus, according to the Pew Research study, 76% of American adults read at
least one book, and 80% of American adults read for pleasure. Note that these
numbers only reflect theatrical moviegoing, and does not reflect the number of
movies watched at home, but it's still enough to give us authors hope!
• As a medium, trends female. The same Pew Research study reveals that women read for
pleasure more than men (84% versus 76%), and that white, non-Hispanic readers read
more for pleasure (83%) than black, non-Hispanic readers (79%) or Hispanic readers
(68%). The 18-29 demographic reads most for pleasure (83%), followed by 50-64 (81%),
65+ (80%) and finally 30-49 (78%). Those with the highest education (College+, 92%)
and income ($75,000, 88%) read the most for pleasure, and decrease accordingly at each
step (some college, 84%; high school grad, 75%, less than high school, 56%; $50K-
$74.9K, 82%; $30K-$49.9K 80%; <$30K, 76%). Urban readers read the most for
pleasure (83%), with both suburban and rural readers tied for second (79%). Further, as
of that survey e-book readership was still dwarfed by print, with only a small number
listening to audiobooks:
•

Read a
book in
any format
Read a print
book
Read an e-
book
Listened to
an audio
book

182
Perrin 2016, Appendix A.
Long 335
Total 73% 65% 28% 14%
Men 68% 61% 27% 14%
Women 77% 70% 29% 14%
White, non-
HIspanic
76% 70% 31% 15%
Black, non-
Hispanic
69% 63% 23% 11%
18-29 80% 72% 35% 16%
30-49 73% 65% 32% 15%
50-64 70% 64% 24% 15%
65+ 67% 61% 19% 9%
Less than high
school
45% 38% 11% 12%
High school
grad
62% 55% 19% 9%
Some college 81% 74% 32% 14%
College+ 86% 79% 41% 20%
Below $30,000 65% 59% 19% 9%
$30,000-
$49,999
74% 68% 26% 16%
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$50,000-
$74,999
75% 69% 33% 19%
$75,000+ 81% 73% 40% 16%
Urban 75% 69% 29% 17%
Suburban 73% 64% 30% 14%
Rural 66% 61% 22% 10%
⁠
183

Television
As a storytelling medium, television:
• Can be highly serialized. Perhaps the most widely-assumed affordance of television is
its ability to tell longer stories told across a number of chapters delivered at a (more or
less) regular cadence. Serialized narratives were common in the days of silent cinema, as
in such popular features as Fantômas (1912) and The Perils of Pauline (1914), but their
number dropped precipitously once the new technology – and added cost – of sound was
introduced. A smaller number of studios continued to produce serials with a few breakout
hits, like 1936's Flash Gordon from Universal Pictures, but by the 1950s serialized
narratives had shifted almost completely to the smaller screen.
• Can tell much longer stories. TV series can tell more decompressed stories, with a 24-
episode network series having 16 hours to tell a story as opposed to the two hours of a
feature film. This can support much more complex stories, with more prolonged character
development.
• Can be less expensive to produce. Historically, TV shows were produced with lower
budgets than feature films. However, as of this writing the "Peak TV" era has begun to

183
Ibid.
Long 337
disrupt this tradition. In late 2017 Maureen Ryan and Cynthia Littleton conducted a series
of interviews with Hollywood executives for Variety, writing: "the estimates on the cost
of content that emerged from these interviews peg the typical range of the production
budget for high-end cable and streaming dramas at $5 million-$7 million an hour, while
single-camera half hours on broadcast and cable run from $1.5 million to more than $3
million. With the exception of HBO, which made its mark with lavish productions, that’s
a significant increase, during just the past five years, over what had been $3 million-$4
million for cable dramas and around $1 million-$1.5 million for single-camera half hours.
And Netflix often exceeds the new, higher averages. The first season of its supernatural
sensation Stranger Things was shot to look like a 1980s Steven Spielberg movie and
came with a price tag of $6 million an episode for season one, rising to $8 million in
season two. Netflix’s sumptuous period drama The Crown cost an estimated $10 million
an episode."
184
By these numbers, two hours of The Crown cost more than Guillermo del
Toro's Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water, which was made for a budget of $19.5
million – but still less per hour than the 2017 Winston Churchill biopic The Darkest Hour,
which was produced for $30 million. Even the final episodes of HBO's Game of Thrones,
which are being produced at a budget of $15 million an hour, cost vastly less than the
$200 million budget for Marvel's Black Panther.
• Can be (mostly) gender-balanced. While they may not necessarily be watching the
same shows, the average amount of time spent watching TV is fairly close – especially on
weekdays. According to Statista, the average daily time spent watching TV per capita in
the US in 2016 was 2.61 hours by men and 2.37 hours by women on weekdays, and 3.75
hours by men and 2.89 hours by women on weekends.
185

• Can also generate a wide possible audience. The American appetite for TV is voracious.
According to Nielsen, in Q2 2017 the total time spent per week watching live TV by
American audiences was 27 hours and 44 minutes, with an additional 3 hours and 18
minutes of DVR'ed/time-shifted TV. Note, however, that the once-premium target market
of 18-24 year-olds only represents a small portion of that; American audiences aged 18-

184
Ryan 2017.
185
Statista 2017.
Long 338
24 watched an average of 11 hours and 22 minutes of live TV, with an additional 1 hour
and 22 minutes spent watching DVR'ed/time-shifted TV. This is a staggering ~50% drop-
off from 2011, when that average (total) was 24 hours and 17 minutes:
186

• 500+ Channels = targeted audiences. The arrival of cable TV meant an explosion of
channels, and an explosion of content to fill those channels. While that virtually killed the
"watercooler moments" age of television, when most of America watched the same three
channels and could be largely relied on to watch the same hit shows like I Love Lucy, it
kicked off a new era of hypertargeted content aimed at niche audiences on channels like
Syfy, the History Channel, and HGTV.
• Can be customized for region. Transmedia storytellers with an eye towards developing
global franchises might consider developing subfranchises for each target market. The X-
Factor star Simon Cowell might have an obnoxious on-screen persona, but he may also
be a genius: his creation Britain's Got Talent introduced the "Got Talent" format, which
has been adapted to over 58 territories around the world – earning it the title of "most
successful reality TV format ever" by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2014.
187

Storyworlds can adapt a similar model – consider how NCIS has generated the successful
location-specific spinoffs NCIS: Los Angeles and NCIS: New Orleans in the US alone.

186
Marketingcharts.com 2017.
187
Wightman 2014.
Long 339
It's easy to imagine additional spinoffs focusing on the equivalent of the NCIS across
Europe or China – leading to more global crossovers between the shows.

Audio
Around 2012 Donald Brinkman, then at Microsoft Research, was excitedly telling me about one
of his ideas. “What’s the most powerful storytelling medium?” he asked.
“The human voice,” I replied, without missing a beat.
Donald blinked. He’d expected me to say “film,” “the Internet,” or maybe even (given what I
was working on at the time) “video games.” It’s easy to overlook something so low-tech and
fundamental to being human, and it’s equally easy to underestimate the impact that simple sound
can have. Audio storytelling:
• Can be very interactive. For all the hype around video games and digital entertainment
as “interactive”, we often forget that storytelling began as interactive: any really good
live storyteller carefully watches the reactions of her audience and subtly changes the
story as she goes based on their reactions. She might drop parts of the story that she
might deem as too risqué for a younger audience, or tart things up a bit to titillate an older
one. She might change how she performs the spoken lines of a character based on how
humorous she wants the story to be, or change the speed of delivery or the level of detail
in the story based on time constraints.
• Can be intensely engaging. Think of how many “driveway moments” you might have
experienced while listening to really amazing stories on NPR. Think of how much time
politicians spend giving speeches. Think back to the last time you were told a story by
your parents, or grandparents. The human voice is an incredibly impactful medium, as
evidenced by centuries’ worth of study of the art of oratory. There is something about
dealing with a live performer that makes us sit up and take notice, especially in more
intimate settings. One might doze off during a TV show, or at a movie, or even in a
particularly large theater during a play or musical – but it’s something of an
accomplishment to fall asleep when one person is telling a story to a smaller group of
Long 340
people.
188
This heightened engagement also arguably creates more of an impact on the
audience, and thus creates more lasting memories and, possibly, greater word of mouth.
(I’d argue this is also why early ARGs were so effective as buzz-builders, but more on
that later in this chapter.)
• Can deliver extremely engaging ‘imagery’ at a very, very low cost. Economically
speaking, audio can also provide one of the biggest bangs for the storyteller’s buck. Much
like the written word, audio requires little in the way of a special effects budget. I can tell
you a story about a city made of light and water, and your imagination will paint the
picture for me and I don’t have to spend a dime on special effects or art supplies. If I
chose to add sound effects to my story, the cost might increase, but even so a really great
foley artist can do magic with common household items.
189
As I mentioned earlier, in his
1964 text Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, theorist Marshall McLuhan
famously classified different types of media as “hot” or “cool” depending on the amount
of work the audience has to put into the story. A film is hot because it does most of the
work for the audience; audio dramas would be significantly cooler because the audience
has to imagine what the characters look like, what the setting looks like, and so on.
Further, as I mentioned in the earlier chapter on negative space and migratory cues, when
I do that work the story inherently becomes more customized to me, and thus is a more
engaging personal experience.
• Can use music to be more emotionally evocative and memorable. Adding music is
clearly another way to quickly increase cost (in some cases, dramatically so) but music
also brings a significant boost in impact, especially in the case of transmedia experiences.
Music is among the ultimate art forms when it comes to direct emotional connection, and
masters of film scoring and composition like John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and Ennio
Morricone know how to weave story and sound together in ways that can haunt audiences
for decades. Sharing a theme song between components of a transmedia experience can

188
Depending on the skill of the storyteller, of course. I’ve met some folks who could turn the most
vibrant premise for a barnburner-pageturner into a cure for insomnia. I’ve also had students in a tiny, five-
person seminar fall asleep. It took everything in my power not to rain Nerf darts down upon them.
189
One of the most entertaining experiences I’ve ever had was attending a live performance of Garrison
Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. Watching his foley crew do the sound effects work for his Guy
Noir segments was nothing short of amazing - and hysterically funny.
Long 341
create strong bonds between them, with subtle variations between them also evoking
changes occurring in the storyline. For example, John Williams wove subtle hints of Star
Wars’ Imperial March – colloquially better known as Darth Vader’s theme song – into
the otherwise upbeat theme music for young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace
to foreshadow who, and what, the young boy would eventually become.
• Is frequently considered a niche medium – but can also deliver potentially quite
large audiences. Obviously audio is not without its drawbacks. Very few people sit in
their parlors and listen to radio dramas anymore; instead, audio dramas suffer from
audiences only paying partial attention, such as on the car stereo during long drives or
commutes, or on headphones during particularly monotonous stretches at work. Aural
storytelling also tends to be a relatively niche medium; according to the Association of
American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, in 2012 printed trade books
generated $15B in revenue in the United States (which includes adult, YA and kids’
fiction and non-fiction, but not school textbooks or professional/scholarly books), e-
books generated $3B, and audiobooks generated a comparatively paltry $241M. However,
as of this writing a new audio renaissance is exploding in podcasts. The jaw-dropping
success of Serial and Lore (which hit the 100,000,000 downloads mark on November 28,
2017) attest to the potential of podcasting as a mass entertainment medium.
An inventive storyteller might also add mobility to this list, given the ubiquity of audio-playing
mobile devices. Finally, another intriguing opportunity audio offers storytellers is how actors
sound changes less over time than how they look. This is an affordance that Doctor Who has
leveraged spectacularly over the years, as multiple audio dramas have been produced with
previous Doctors, set during the years those actors portrayed the Doctor. If those stories were
produced for television it might raise some eyebrows, as these actors might not look the way
they did several decades ago, but in audio they still sound like the characters the fans have loved
for years.

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Comics
Comics are frequently referred to as sequential art because they are comprised of a series of
visual images that tell a story by being placed in a sequence. These images are commonly
accompanied by text, as captions, text balloons, or sound effects. Comics:
• Use the reader's imagination to complete the work. Much like text, comics are a
McLuhanian "cool" medium – although perhaps not as cool as text. Whereas pure text
relies on the reader's imagination to create the visuals, sounds, and motion, comics supply
the visuals and a greater degree of the sound via visualized sound effects (the infamous
"Pam! Bow! Biff!", for example) but still relies on the reader's imagination to provide
what comics artist and theorist Scott McCloud calls closure. According to McCloud, the
power of comics lies in how the reader fills in the gaps between panels; in a comic in
which one panel shows a hand holding a gun and a BANG sound effect and the second
panel shows a body lying bleeding on the floor, it's the reader who does the actual
"shotting" in their imaginations.
190

As the legendary comics artist and theorist Will Eisner wrote in Comics and Sequential
Art, "Sequential art as practiced in comics presents a technical hurdle that can only be
negotiated with some acquired skill. The number of images allowed is limited, whereas in
film or animation an idea or emotion can be expressed by hundreds of images displayed
in fluid sequence at such speed as to emulate real movement. In print this effect can only
be simulated. This challenge is not a disadvantage, however: in fact, it enables comics’
singular ability to allow a reader to consider many images at the same time, or from
different directions, a capability film lacks."
191
Eisner continues: "'Writing' for comics
can be defined as the conception of an idea, the arrangement of image elements and the
construction of the sequence of the narration and the composing of dialogue. It is at once
a part and the whole of the medium. It is a special skill, its requirements not always in
common with other forms of writing, for it deals with a singular technology. It is closest
in requirements to playwriting, but for the fact that the writer, in the case of comics, is

190
McCloud 1993.
191
Eisner 2008, p. 20.
Long 343
often also the image-maker (artist). In sequential art the two functions are irrevocably
interwoven. Sequential art is the act of weaving a fabric. In writing with words alone, the
author directs the reader’s imagination. In comics the imagining is done for the reader.
An image once drawn becomes a precise statement that brooks little or no further
interpretation. When the two are mixed, the words become welded to the image and no
longer serve to describe but rather to provide sound, dialogue and connective
passages."
192

• Lend themselves to internal dialogue and conflict more than film, but perhaps not
as much as pure text. Comics' hybrid nature permits authors to superimpose characters'
inner dialogue onto the imagery, either through thought balloons or, increasingly, through
text in inset boxes.
• Can be affordable to produce – especially when depicting giant spectacles. Comics
are not as affordable as pure text, as they frequently require a greater number of people
(artists, letterers and colorists in addition to writers and editors, etc.), but it's still vastly
cheaper to produce a visual story using still images on ink and paper (or pixels) than it is
to produce such images in animation or video. This comes in very handy when depicting
enormous spectacles, such as two armies crashing into each other on a vast battlefield, or
gargantuan entities like Fantastic Four's Galactus or Transformers' Unicron devouring
entire planets.
• Can make beautiful physical objects. As with regular text, works of sequential art can
make for gorgeous printed artifacts. DC's "Absolute" editions of seminal texts like Neil
Gaiman’s Sandman and Alan Moore’s Watchmen are oversized, luxurious books in
beautiful slipcases, and both Dark Horse and IDW produce similarly beautiful editions of
such books as Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo and Kevin Eastman
and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Other presses produce even more
breathtaking editions, like Pantheon's 2012 edition of Chris Ware's Building Stories,
which is a boxed set of fourteen various printed pieces including books, newspapers,
flipbooks and broadsheets.
193

192
Eisner 2008, pp. 127-128.
193
Stamp 2012.
Long 344
• Lend themselves well to experimentation. In his second book, Reinventing Comics,
Scott McCloud trumpets the ways digital technology might transform comics. He points
to webcomics that incorporate motion, interactivity, and the "infinite canvas" offered by
webpages, in which comics break free of the three-panel or comic-page limitations and
expand in any direction for as long as the story demands.
• Are a fairly niche market. The potential market for comics has long been considered a
tiny fraction of the potential market for books, a notion that's supported by the data.
According to NPD BookScan, the top five book titles in 2017 totaled 4.5 million copies
(notably down from 8.4 million in 2016),
194
but, also according to NPD BookScan, the
top five graphic novel titles in 2017 totaled only 1.4 million copies.
195

• Trend adult white male – kind of. At the 2017 New York Comic-Con, NPD
BookScan's Kristen McClean dropped some very interesting numbers. As summarized by
ICV2's Brigid Alverson:
o 63% of comics and graphic novels are purchased by men, 37% by women
o 57% of comics and graphic novels are bought by 13-29 year olds
o Less than half (47%) of comics sold in comic shops are bought by 13-29 year olds
o 72% of purchases in comic shops are by men, with 30-50 year olds the largest age
category
o 59% of purchases in chain stores are by men, with 13-29 as the largest age
category for both men and women
o 67% of online purchases are by men, and for both men and women, the largest
group is 13-20-year-olds
o comic shop shoppers are more likely to have some college education (85%) than
the general comics and graphic novel-buying population (73%)
o overall, the comics and graphic novel-buying public is 69% (non-Hispanic) white,
12% Latino, 10% African American, and 8% Asian
o the breakdown in comic shops is 71% white, 13% Latino, 14% black, and 5%
Asian

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NPD 2018.
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Hibbs 2018.
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o 33% of all comics and graphic novel buyers have incomes below $35,000
o in comic shops, 41% have incomes lower than $35,000
o superhero buyers skew heavily male (78%)
o manga buyers are more evenly divided, with 56% male and 44% female
o manga buyers are younger: 76% under 30
o by contrast, 50% of superhero buyers are under 30
o the male superhero audience is evenly balanced between the 13-29 and 30-54 age
groups
o female superhero buyers, on the other hand, skew younger
o superhero buyers are more likely to have graduated college (perhaps because so
many manga fans are younger)
o manga buyers are more likely to have a household income under $35,000 (43% of
the manga audience vs. 27% of the overall comics audience)
o the manga audience is more diverse (59% white) than either the overall comics
market (79% white) or superhero comics buyers (69% white)
• Had a negative connotation for many (pre-manga and pre-Marvel Cinematic
Universe). When I was younger, comics were “just for kids” or “just for geeks”. This has
mercifully been changing over the last 30 years. While comic sales make up a tiny sliver
of the ticket sales for the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example, comics
have become more acceptable as mainstream entertainment. In addition to the explosion
in popularity for both manga and comics-based movies and TV shows since the early
2000s, the factors for this shift include an increasing number of mainstream literary
authors making the jump to comics (including Margaret Atwood with Angel Catbird, Ta-
Nahesi Coates with his run on Black Panther, and Philip Pullman with The Adventures of
John Blake) and comics authors making the jump to mainstream literature, film and
television (including Neil Gaiman with American Gods, Warren Ellis with Gun Machine
and Red, and Brian K. Vaughan with his work on Lost, Under the Dome and Runaways).
• Can tell longer stories through series, short stories through one-offs, or mid-sized
stories through original graphic novels. The scope of the stories told in comics can
range from the extraordinarily short (think one-panel gag comics like Gil Keane’s The
Family Circus, Chas Addams’ The Addams Family, or Gary Larson’s The Far Side), the
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fairly short with three-panel comic strips, the just short with one-off comic books in the
24-page range, mid-length with 3-issue or 6-issue arcs in comic book series, the longer
end of the spectrum with 12-issue or more arcs or multi-arc stories in comic book series
(think Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy or Jeff Smith’s Bone), or at the
super-long end of the spectrum (as evidenced by the 1000+-issue story of Superman in
DC Comics or Dave Sim’s 6000-page epic Cerebus).

Alternate Reality Games
Some might consider alternate reality games (ARGs for short) a 'new' medium, but its roots can
arguably be dated back to the mid-80s and the transmedia 'creepypasta'-style collaborative story
of Ong's Hat, which unfolded across zines, bulletin boards and Xerox art networks.
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Alternate
reality games:
• Deliberately blur the line between the fictional and the real. Perhaps the most distinct
characteristic of alternate reality games is how they play with the user's sense of reality.
The willing suspension of disbelief is a key component of all storytelling experiences, but
ARGs repurpose objects, places, events and other elements of everyday lives into
components of a story that permeate the player's reality. Ong's Hat is considered an ARG
for how it repurposed early Internet elements like bulletin boards for fictional purposes
without a clear announcement that the contents were fictional. This same approach was
taken later by transmedia storytelling pioneer Michael Monello and his collaborators for
the supernatural "found-footage" film The Blair Witch Project in 1999, the marketing
campaign for which included fictional websites, a fake documentary broadcast on the
Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy), and IMDB entries falsely claiming the actors in the movie
were deceased in the run-up to the film's release. All of this resulted in a massive amount
of buzz and whispering among audiences: "Is it real? It can't be real. Could it be real?"
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Other "blockbuster" ARGs like The Beast (created by Microsoft to promote the 2001

196
Kinsella 2011.
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I first viewed The Blair Witch Project projected on the side of a barn in the woods with a small horde
of fellow college students. Talk about verisimilitude!
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Kubrick/Spielberg film A.I.) and ilovebees (created by 42 Entertainment to promote
Microsoft's Halo 2 in 2004) followed a similar approach, planting subtle "trailheads" or
introductory hooks to their experiences in "ordinary" media like movie trailers and
incorporating elements like having the story characters call players on the player's phones
to create the "alternate reality" from the medium's title. A term commonly heard in the
mid-2000s ARG community was TINAG – "This Is Not A Game," a gleeful mantra for a
hardcore, steadfast denial that what was going on was fiction. Over time, the TINAG
philosophy was increasingly abandoned, as the novelty wore off and more conservative,
risk-adverse lawyers prevailed.
• Are highly engaging. There is no question that a well-done ARG is intensely engaging.
Some ARGs unfold on a global scale, with players around the world collaborating in real-
time to solve puzzles and find clues either online or in the real world.
• Can range from very cheap to hugely expensive. It’s possible to develop an alternate
reality game on a shoestring budget, relying primarily on cheap components like phone
calls, websites, printed mailers or posters, and so on. However, it’s also possible to
produce alternate reality games with breathtaking production values and budgets to match.
The Year Zero ARG for Nine Inch Nails included not only flash drives embedded in the
walls of buildings, but live actors, video components, and a chartered bus that hauled
players to a private performance by the band themselves. Why So Serious, the ARG
developed to promote Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel The Dark Knight, included
professionally-produced newspapers from Gotham City, pins and other promotional
materials for a “I Believe in Harvey Dent” election campaign, and a grand finale that
projected an exclusive “Jokerized” trailer for the film on the side of a skyscraper.
• Are difficult to archive and reproduce. While the materials from an ARG are relatively
easy to collect and archive, the actual experience of an ARG is almost impossible to
replicate. Part of this is inherent to the combination of live theater, improv, and 1960s-
style “happenings” at the core of ARGs’ DNA, but since ARGs have frequently been
produced as promotional campaigns for other media (as in Why So Serious, The Beast
and ilovebees above), once the thing the ARG is promoting is released, there’s little to no
marketing budget left to continue an ongoing ARG experience. In some ways, the
popularity of escape rooms can be partially charted in inverse proportion to the popularity
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of ARGs. An escape room captures a taste of the collaborative problem-solving
experience in a narrative atmosphere as an ARG, but at a tiny fraction of the scale – and
it can be repeated over and over again by simply resetting the room. The same might be
argued for VR parlors like The VOID.
• Can be tricky to tier payoff to invested time. As I described earlier for Why So Serious,
those who played the game developed an emotional attachment to a character that gave
out missions as the head of a group of Batman-wannabe vigilantes. When the Joker kills
that character in the movie, it has a much more visceral impact on those players than it
had on those moviegoers who hadn’t played the game. However, many ARGs are no
small investment; even though most ARGs are free to play, they still take up a significant
amount of the players’ time. How much time would Why So Serious players have had to
invest before they received a significantly different emotional experience watching the
film? This is not that dissimilar from video games; LOST: Via Domus needed 40 or so
hours to complete, but the additive comprehension payoff at the end of that game was
minimal at best. Delivering a payoff that’s valuable enough to justify sometimes weeks of
the audience’s free time is hard to balance with the simultaneous need to have the rest of
the transmedia experience make sense without a user having invested that time.

A Very Important Disclaimer
Through the preceding sections, there should have been a little voice in the back of your head
saying, “Yeah, but… Yeah, but…” Lists like these represent one of the primary fallacies of
medium specificity: one expert’s opinion of what a medium should be used for can be so overly
constrictive that it would other imaginative storytellers from creatively demonstrating what the
medium could be used for.
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As Noël Carroll argues,
Proponents of this purist program argue that if the medium in question is to be
truly regarded as an art, then it must have some range of autonomous effects,
effects that are its own and that are not merely copied from pre-existing

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If we listened to Hitchcock, we’d never gave gotten Clerks, My Dinner with André, or An Unfortunate
Truth.
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established art-forms. The purist then specifies the range of effects peculiar to a
given medium, and goes on to urge that artists within that medium focus their
energies upon experimentation within this range of effects. Needless to say,
different theorists will identify different potentials of that medium. Thus, at stage
two in our scenario, we are greeted by contesting recommendations about the
correct line of stylistic development within that medium – recommendations,
moreover, which are each putatively based upon having isolated the peculiar
potentials or capacities of the medium in question.
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In other words, medium specificity arguments maintain that stories told in a medium must
leverage the affordances of that medium. Carroll systematically dismantles this argument,
including the following key points:
• “…If the notion of medium limitations amounts to ‘Do not make a medium do what it
cannot,’ then the slogan is otiose since it is quite frankly impossible to make a medium
do what it can’t. … If the slogan is to be ‘only aspire for effects that are possible in your
medium,’ the same objection suffices; for we can be certain that no artist will ever
execute anything that is literally unattainable, literally not possible, in his medium.”
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• “Certain action-packed events, like chariot races, are said to be easier to mount and to
execute convincingly in film than they are in theater. But chariot races in
theatricalizations of Ben Hur were staged on treadmills in the first decades of this century.
If these chariot races were exciting, suspenseful and spectacular, what difference does it
make that they would have been easier, in some sense, to execute in film? …Why should
comparative difficulty make any difference if the final effect is excellent?”
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• “A related modification of the medium specificity thesis would be to say that
specification of the medium’s powers helps us explain why certain works succeed and
others fail. It is often said, for example, that stage plays or screenplays with much
dialogue and restricted movement are not easily acquitted in cinema. Such attempts, often

199
Carroll 1996, p. 3.
200
Carroll 1996, p. 9.
201
Carroll 1996, p. 10.
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disdained as ‘canned theater,’ result in awkward films. But it is important to notice that
often our paradigm cases of ‘canned theater’ – viz., early talkies – were not simply bad
movies; they were also bad theater.”
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• “Why suppose that what differentiates media – their defining features – leads in any way
to interesting aesthetic results? …Just because a given image or effect can only be made
by means of video does not give us any reason to expect that that fact alone guarantees
that the image will be aesthetically interesting.”
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For example, a commonly-argued unique affordance of text is that it yields a high degree of
interiority – a first-person novel allows the audience to “get into” the thought processes of a
character in ways that other media cannot. However, this does not mandate that every book must
be written in the first person. For many books, a first-person point of view would be ludicrous, if
not disastrous. Phone books and encyclopedias spring to mind. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum’s
Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, it’s less about if you could do something than if you should.
In reality, the co-evolution of media and storytelling is messy, a vicious “survival of the fittest”
fought in the wilds of industry, market and audience. As an emerging medium struggles to find
its footing, media-makers and audiences alike engage in (frequently quite heated) conversations:
what should and should not be considered an example of that medium, what is and is not a “good”
example of that medium, what is and is not considered a “good” use of that medium, and so on.
This debate functions as a form of natural selection, as ideas and creations and creators are
evaluated by the community (both makers and audience) and the market, and those deemed the
most worthy survive and replicate. Techniques that work well are copied. Storytellers whose
work gains traction with the audience are paid to tell more stories. New platforms that prove
effective to storytellers and audiences alike get more and more stuff made for them. Perhaps out
of sheer necessity, as a new medium evolves in this way a language for, and of, that emergent
medium evolves alongside it.
In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, the authors describe not only the critical importance

202
Carroll 1996, p. 10.
203
Carroll 1996. p 15.
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of such a common language to an emerging medium, but where that language frequently
originates:
Industrial standardization included uniformity in nomenclature and dimensions,
simplification in types, sizes and grades, and safety provisions and rules of
practice. Such standardization facilitated mass production. Standardization also
included specifications, methods of testing quality, and ratings under specific
conditions.
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[…]Mechanisms for [such] standardization included ones somewhat
connected to the industry – trade publications and critics and ‘how-to’ books –
and ones external to the industry – college courses, newspaper reviewing,
theoretical writing, and museum exhibitions. Undoubtedly there are others, but
these will suggest how standards were available to influence the company’s and
worker’s conception of how the motion picture ought to look and sound. While
these mechanisms presented themselves as educational and informative, they were
also prescriptive. A how-to-write-a-movie-script book advised not only how it
was done but how it ought to be done to insure a sale. In the case of reviewers or
theorists, the references to established standards in other arts (theater, literature,
painting, design, music, still photography) perpetuated ideological/signifying
practices – although, of course, in mediated form.
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According to Bordwell et al, paratexts such as Epes Winthrop Sargent’s columns for Moving
Picture World originated or spread concepts that would become not only the language used to
describe what was happening on-screen, but the language of film itself.
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By calling out and
naming techniques early filmmakers were inventing, such as close-ups or jump cuts, and
commenting on how and where these experimental techniques were particularly effective,
Sargent and his like advised early filmmakers what worked in this new medium – and their
influence accelerated the repeated use of these new techniques in other films. This repetition and
commentary also cemented audience understanding of what these techniques meant, so a shot of
the outside of a building followed immediately by a shot of a living room came to not only be

204
Bordwell et al 1985, p. 96.
205
Bordwell et al 1985, p. 106.
206
For more on this see my 2011 white paper, How to Ride a Lion.
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known as an ‘establishing shot’ to filmmakers, but audiences came to understand that
juxtaposition of images as a visual “sentence” providing more context for where the action was
happening. As filmmakers adopted and refined these best practices, particularly effective
techniques (such as cutting together footage from multiple cameras into a single multi-
perspective ‘scene’) became so commonplace that they came to be conflated with the medium, or
even to define the medium.
Note this is not in the ‘medium specificity’ sense that “this is what a medium can do, so
everything in this medium must do this,’ as Carroll criticized, but in a messier, more democratic,
and vastly more pragmatic ‘this is what both the makers and the audience have deemed to work
particularly well in the service of their end goal – to tell stories and to be told stories.’ Stories do
evolve as media evolve – but storytelling does not evolve because of technological advances, it
evolves in response to shifts in cultural and market demands.
This is why it is important to develop both an understanding of medium specificity and leveraged
affordances and how to critically evaluate stories and media. A purely techno-centric,
technodeterministic approach heads down the slippery slope that Carroll warns about. Instead of
evaluating a new technology for what it enables stories to do and building stories to leverage
those new affordances, it is frequently better to evaluate what storytellers and audiences really
want to do and determine what new technologies or approaches should be used, or invented, to
meet those demands. For example, our gravitation towards rhizomatic narratives with multiple
characters suggests that what is needed are better technologies for following complex narratives
with multiple narrative paths.
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Similarly, using VR and AR and game engines in the process of
making better movies faster makes sense, as these are user-centered design innovations, using
technologies to meet user needs, rather than technodeterministic impositions. We should
absolutely experiment, but as Bordwell et al demonstrated, the ongoing conversations among
both the community and the market will determine the long-term impact of such technologies on
the evolution of storytelling.
A further complexity of medium specificity is that saying that medium A can do something –
such as the interiority of text – is not to say that medium B cannot do the same thing. Film can

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More on this momentarily.
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also provide a sense of interiority, especially depending on the adventurousness of the filmmaker.
While voiceover narration is rarely used in film, it has been used to great effect in such films as
The Shawshank Redemption, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, A Christmas Story and – debatably –
Blade Runner. More recently, experiments with first-person filmmaking have yielded
compelling results like Aneesh Chaganty’s 2014 short film Seeds, shot using (and used to
promote) the ill-fated Google Glass’ head-mounted camera. To perhaps counter-argue against
my own previous paragraph, such first-person filmmaking is leading – naturally – to an emerging
aesthetics of virtual reality filmmaking, or 360-degree filmmaking, in which the audience is
invited to step more directly into the shoes of a particular character, a la Being John Malkovich,
or into a particular location. Morris May and Rose Troche’s Perspective; Chapter 1: The Party,
which showed to rave reviews at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, tells a story of sexual assault
set at a frat party and experienced from both the man and woman’s point of view through an
Oculus Rift. However, perhaps these two paragraphs are not much at odds at all; while The Party
tells its story by effectively turning the characters’ eyes into cameras, it still does not capture the
sense of what either character is actually thinking, or their history with one another, or any of the
larger contexts of what it means to “be” a character. The term “POV” is becoming increasingly
complicated through these new technologies, because it highlights that a person’s point of view,
or perspective, is not merely where their eyes are looking but why their eyes are looking there,
and what the results of that gaze mean to the person in question.
A more nuanced approach to this issue can be seen in the virtual reality “filmmaking” (more
experience-making) of Nonny de la Peña, whose “virtual reality journalism” projects tend more
towards placing the audience member into the role of a witness than a character. Her Hunger in
Los Angeles and Use of Force both draw their narrative power from placing the user in the
position of witnessing an injustice and feeling powerless to do anything about it – in the former
watching a homeless person in a food line collapse from hunger, and in the latter watching a
savage act of police brutality on the US/Mexico border. By removing the subtle conceptual “safe
distance” between the screen and the viewer, leveraging the affordances of virtual reality to
create a more embodied experience, de la Peña sidesteps the question of “who am I supposed to
be in this experience” and replaces it with “what would I do in this experience,” followed
immediately after removing the headset by “what can I do now in the real world to prevent such
real-world experiences from happening in the future?”
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Two final caveats about medium specificity and leveraged affordances. First, remember that as
all media become digital and interconnected, any distinctions of medium specificity are quickly
blurring. Episodic narrative content that is designed to be distributed online using platforms like
YouTube are frequently referred to as webisodes, but a show like Game of Thrones that is
designed to be originally broadcast on TV is still a “TV show” – even if it’s simultaneously
released online. So what, then, is a show that adheres to virtually all norms of television but is
released online? Is it a webisode if it’s on YouTube, but a TV show if it’s a Hulu original like
Marvel’s Runaways? Hulu is interesting because it’s a mix of online exclusives and traditional
TV shows; Netflix is increasingly a destination for online-only originals, so are the Marvel
Netflix originals like Daredevil or Jessica Jones considered TV shows or webisodes? Further
complicating matters are shows like CBS’ Star Trek: Discovery, which is primarily an online-
only show but had its first episode broadcast traditionally on CBS to lure potential viewers to
CBS’ digital subscription service where the rest would be released – interestingly enough, on a
weekly schedule as if it were a regular TV show.
Similarly, it is (partly) for this reason that the term ‘transmedia’ may be temporary as well. As
such distinctions erode, so too will the uniqueness of crafting experiences that move from one
medium to another. A story delivered across multiple media may be transmedia; an experience
that combines media into a single component may be multimedia; and as all media experiences
blur and blend and bond, they may simply become just media.
That said, just as radio didn’t disappear when television added visuals, distinct media will likely
continue to exist alongside such mixed media for centuries to come. Therefore, understanding
the following distinctions will remain useful for at least a little while yet – but, again, it may be
the most useful to understand these nuances to consider these media types as paints on a palette,
for storytellers individually or in combination with one another.
Finally, this very notion has a very high amount of intrinsic optimism. Storytellers may
frequently have very little choice about which medium they can use. Examples of comics or
novels by creators who really wanted those stories to be movies are thick on the ground. As
Andrea Philips writes:
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In an ideal world, the media you’d choose to use would be the ones that serve the
story best. Bam, you’re done. Unfortunately, in the real world, we have to be a
little more pragmatic and take into account a giddy whirlwind of factors, from
time and budget restrictions to audience sophistication, accessibility, and scale.
Your audience should influence which media you use. A great transmedia
campaign uses the platforms its target audience already calls home, and doesn’t
use the ones that the target audience thinks poorly of or doesn’t have access to at
all. Just as an example, a project for tweens that requires access to cutting-edge
technology is limiting its audience out of the gate. Tweens might not have access
to the latest smartphone or iPad, and aren’t likely to have the resources to acquire
one, either.
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So, with all of these caveats in mind, let’s dive deeper into the “new screens” like augmented
reality and virtual reality, and then a few examples of more “unconventional media” to
demonstrate how some very creative minds are thinking about the future of storytelling.

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Philips 2012, p. 109.
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The New Screens
In an interview with Andrea Phillips for her book A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling,
Elan Lee and Sean Stewart are quoted as follows:
The Internet is a printing press, a movie camera. Just as those inventions led to the
development of the novel and the motion picture, we’re going to see the birth of
new kinds of storytelling that are more than just “a book you read on your Kindle”
or “a movie you watch on your iPad”.
People will find ways to use the capabilities of the tech (the mic on your cell
phone, the gyroscope on your tablet) to make you laugh and cry. And because
spending all day on that is more fun than bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly,
all of us who are interested in new forms of entertainment will be working hard to
create the business models that support this next-gen content.
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As I described in the introduction, I’ve been exploring the opportunities of emerging
technologies for storytelling since the mid-90s. Part of the joy of that continued exploration is
seeing “new media” become just media, as they mature into forms that can sit alongside such
“traditional” media as book, TV and comics – it’s difficult for anyone to argue that video games
are a “new medium” now, with the “ludology vs. narratology” debate (mercifully!) fading
quickly in the rear-view mirror:

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Philips 2012, p. 9.
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When I joined the Annenberg Innovation Lab in 2013, I kicked off a research initiative called
“The New Screens” that explored how we’re telling stories with virtual reality, augmented reality,
connected homes and smart cities, and tangible storytelling using new tech like 3D printers.
Working with the AIL, I developed a number of prototypes to try and develop a deeper
understanding of the affordances of these emerging media. Some of them were deeply rewarding,
and others quickly revealed that a great deal of the hype surrounding these media was just that –
hype. In both cases, these explorations were deeply informative – and yielded some great
insights into how I believe these media will evolve, just like video games, from “new media”
into just media.

Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR):
• Can be highly immersive. The first thing that people think of when we discuss virtual
reality is how it enables storytelling in 360 degrees. Newcomers to VR may still have
unrealistic expectations, informed by such media experiences as the Holodeck on Star
Trek: The Next Generation, how cyberspace is depicted in William Gibson’s
Neuromancer, or the OASIS in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. The extent of this
immersion is frequently depicted as a dangerous substitute for the real world, as in the
Wachowski siblings’ Matrix trilogy. In reality, VR is – as of this writing – still a
technology very much still in development, and many people find it difficult to spend
prolonged periods of time in VR without suffering eyestrain, nausea, or ridiculous red
marks on one’s face.
• Can be done alone or in groups. Most in-home VR experiences are single-user, but they
can connect to other users via the Internet for multi-player experiences. Some out-of-
home VR experiences, like The VOID’s Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, enable
multiple players to play at the same place at the same time in a sort of mashup of virtual
reality and laser tag.
• Is frequently considered an ‘empathy engine.’ A number of virtual reality storytellers
have experienced significant success with how VR can place users into some emotionally
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very difficult situations. For example, Nonny de la Peña’s VR artworks, which she refers
to as ‘immersive journalism,’ has placed users into an environment similar to
Guantanamo Bay (“Gone Gitmo,” with Peggy Weil) or to the US-Mexico border to
witness an act of police brutality (“Use of Force”). In both cases users experience a flash
of the emotional distress that comes from being in such situations, “generating empathy”
for the individuals featured in the pieces.
• Can range from the very affordable to the prohibitively expensive. Some VR
“headsets” are super-affordable because they rely on the user dropping their phone into a
plastic or cardboard device that resembles a classic View-Master. It’s no coincidence that
Mattel created a modern, updated View-Master VR using this approach. The Google Cardboard
versions of these types of headsets were so cheap to produce that they were sometimes
given away as promotional materials, as Syfy did at the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con to
promote their series The Expanse. Other headsets designed for in-home use debuted with
hefty price tags but have fallen over time; as of this writing, HTC’s Vive Pro headset
retails for $799 and its Vive VR System retails for $499, and the Oculus Rift retails for
$399. All of these also require a fairly powerful PC to operate, but on May 1, 2018
Oculus released the (more or less) fully self-contained Oculus Go headset at $199, with
Monitor Deloitte’s Jaime Rodriguez-Ramos referring to Go as an “iPhone moment” for
VR.
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• Can range from lean-back to very, very lean-forward. Devices like Google Cardboard
or Oculus Go are ideal for more “lean-back” VR, where a user can remain seated and
experience an experience unfolding around them with little to no interaction. Some of
these experiences aren’t produced in full 360 degrees, but only 180 degrees, so the user
doesn’t have to worry about missing anything happening behind them. Other experiences,
like the aforementioned Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at The VOID, are extremely
lean-forward, requiring users to physically move through a physical space, dodging laser
blasts and returning fire.
• Can incorporate tangible storytelling. Just before I arrived at USC’s World Building
Media Lab, Alex McDowell and his students and collaborators had unleashed Leviathan

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https://medium.com/@jaime.rodriguezramos/facebooks-f8-vr-first-5cadda85c997
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on the New Frontiers segment of the Sundance Film Festival. Leviathan was sponsored
by Intel, among others, as a kind of stress test for the technologies the sponsors were
developing to support the future of entertainment. Leviathan was a virtual reality
experience with a tangible interface based on the storyworld of Scott Westerfeld’s trilogy
of YA novels Leviathan, Goliath and Behemoth. Those books depicted an alternate
history in which World War I was fought between steam-powered mechs built by the
Clankers and monstrous bioengineered beasts created by the Darwinists. The WbML’s
Leviathan cast users as a bioengineering scientist paying a visit to one of the Darwinists’
flagships, a massive flying whale called (what else?) the Leviathan. The user flies into a
lab strapped to the belly of the flying whale, where they meet a resident scientist who
guides the user through the process of creating a Huxley, a smaller flying creature that
resembles a mix of a squid and a jellyfish. Leviathan took the white dots off of a motion
capture suit and put them onto such physical objects as a canister and a series of switches
and valves. When the scientist character instructed the user to reach out and throw a
switch, their real-world hand would fall upon a real-world switch for them to throw.
Using the motion capture system to marry real-world objects with the virtual-world
experience, effectively creating a tangible interface, created a fantastic illusion of reality
and heightened the sense of immersion in the storyworld.
While I was at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, I wanted to test some common assumptions about
VR. At the time (this was in 2014), much was being made of how virtual reality “must” be
interactive. I also wondered precisely how simply a VR project could be made, with an eye
towards 360-degree storytelling produced more by writers (or dramatists) than game designers.
The result was The Lighthouse in the Woods, an immersive ghost story. The user finds herself
locked in a windowless study as a disembodied voice tells how, one by one, the narrator's family
fell victim to a mysterious curse as a result of breaking a simple rule: they were forbidden to set
foot in, or tell anyone about, a mysterious lighthouse in the middle of a forest that the family was
charged to protect. Portraits on the walls illuminate as each family member is introduced, dim as
each one dies, and re-illuminate as they come back from the dead (because it’s that kind of story).
The audience member can move around the room, but cannot leave it, and has no control over
how the story progresses – replicating the narrator's experience of impending doom and
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helplessness. The user’s attention is directed to each subsequent portrait through the use of light
and sound.
The Lighthouse in the Woods leveraged VR’s unique sense of 360-degree immersion, but by
removing nearly all of the audience's agency, it subverts the assumption that VR is an inherently
interactive medium and delivers a storytelling experience more akin to film, TV or theater. This
project also explores how storytelling could evolve for a connected home: The Lighthouse in the
Woods uses portraits to tell its story because connected digital picture frames are one possible
additional "screen" to use in a living room.
For The Lighthouse in the Woods, I conceived of the project, wrote both the original short story
and the script, created the models in a mix of 123D Design and Maya 2014, built and coded the
prototype in Unity 4.3 for the Oculus Rift DK1, compiled the sound effects, and voiced the
narrator. Additional coding and design was provided by my Assistant Designer, Austin Drexler,
and Erin Reilly served as a Creative Advisor. Other roles in the production were played by Sara
Anderson, Jesica Avellone and Talon Beeson, and original music was provided by Andy Rozsa.
The Lighthouse in the Woods had its first public showing at the Innovation Lab's 2014 Evening
of Innovation on April 23, 2014.
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For the full story of Lighthouse in the Woods, visit
http://www.geoffreylong.com/storyteller/lighthouseinthewoods.php.
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A sample of the deliberately simple art style.
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The layout schematic for the portraits around the room.

Even with all of this potential, there is still a long way to go before VR becomes mainstream
entertainment. For starters, VR places a very long list of demands on would-be users, especially
in a home environment. Headsets like the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, as of this writing, still
require a significant (and significantly expensive) amount of computing power to operate
smoothly, and – perhaps more problematic – a significant amount of open space for the user to
move freely in the VR space. This is even worse than the demands placed on users by the
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gestural interface of the Nintendo Wii, which famously had players breaking lamps and other
furniture during particularly vigorous sets of Wii Bowling or Wii Tennis. In VR, users don
completely opaque headsets, with the systems still learning how to communicate imminent
collisions to their wearers. In many cases, the homes of would-be early adopters (especially in
cities like New York, Los Angeles or Tokyo) are simply too cramped to permit the installation or
use of such hardware.
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Further, VR is still also subject to wanton hyperbole. At one conference I attended, a spokesman
for a sponsor company took the stage and brayed, “VR will make MORE MONEY than any
other medium in history!” Other hucksters have called VR “the final evolution of media.” While
I agree that VR has a significant amount of astonishing potential, both makers and consumers of
VR should take such promises with a grain of salt. Some such hucksters promise that VR will let
you feel what it’s like to be Abraham Lincoln, for example, but such claims are loaded with
problems. A VR ‘camera’ can be placed at the eyeline of someone as tall as Abraham Lincoln,
the experience can replicate the Oval Office of Abraham Lincoln, and it can virtually re-enact
events from the life of Abraham Lincoln, Including – gulp – going to the theater. but while these
elements can approach the context of Abraham Lincoln, it doesn’t begin to replicate how Lincoln
would have reacted to these contexts. Certain clunky tactics can move us down that path,
including pop-up commentary boxes telling us what Lincoln would have thought when allowing
his (and the user’s) gaze to linger on certain people or objects, or a voiceover in Lincoln’s dulcet
tones might give us access to his train of thought, but in reality the sense of thinking like Lincoln,
and thus being Lincoln, might be better replicated through a much older technology: the written
or spoken word, through essays or autobiographies.

Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR), often also referred to as Mixed Reality, is sometimes heralded as an
even bigger opportunity for the future of media than VR. As Apple CEO Tim Cook remarked,
“My own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far, because this
gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present talking to each other, but also have

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I’m speaking from experience here. I haven’t had a living room big enough for VR since 2010.
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other things visually for both of us to see. Maybe it's something we're talking about, maybe it's
someone else here that is not here, present, but could be made to appear to be present with us. So
there's a lot of really cool things there."
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Augmented reality:
• Brings digital elements into the real world. As of this writing, there are numerous
augmented reality experiences that superimpose digital characters onto live footage of the
real world using software development tools like Apple’s ARKit for iOS. The quality of
this illusion varies from experience to experience, with examples including Pokémon Go,
The Walking Dead: Our World, and Ghostbusters World.
• Can make great use of aspects of the real world. More advanced (and ambitious) AR
experiences use different methods of depth sensing to more directly integrate the digital
elements into the real world. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in July of
2017, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s studio Wingnut AR demoed an experience
developed in Apple’s ARKit and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 that featured a science
fiction/Western scene (somewhat evocative of Cowboys vs. Aliens) unfolding all around a
user’s living room.
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The results were gorgeous, but they were also distinctly odd,
because it highlighted a disjoint between what was happening in the fictional world and
the real world it was superimposed onto. The result was the sense of a living room being
overrun by tiny people, not unlike the Army Men in Pixar’s Toy Story.

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Kastrenakes 2016.
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Failes 2017.
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Wingnut AR’s WWDC 2017 demo for Apple’s ARKit.
This disjunction was absent from another Peter Jackson-sponsored demo, this one from
Jackson’s Weta Gameshop for Magic Leap, which depicted the user wielding a
steampunk ray gun and blasting monsters bursting out of the user’s own living room.
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By having the experience unfold at 1:1 scale, it heightens the illusion of the AR
experience happening “in the real world”.

A 2015 demo for Weta Gameshop’s 1:1 Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders AR game.

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Pullar-Strecker 2017.
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A similar approach can be found in the mixed reality crime-solving experience
Fragments for Microsoft’s HoloLens, which uses the device’s advanced spatial mapping
abilities to more directly recognize the elements in the user’s room and customize the
digital elements accordingly. Characters sit on real-world couches, digital pipes are
overlaid onto real-world ceilings… As Brittany Vincent wrote for Popular Science,
“Microsoft's impressive new tech allows for clues to be sprinkled in any room you decide
to play in, which should keep things fresh as you attempt to crack the case. For instance,
Fragments may decide to place a clue beneath your coffee table or behind an item in the
room.”
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The Microsoft HoloLens uses spatial mapping to more intelligently place digital elements.

• Can make the real world ‘annotatable’. Augmented reality can annotate the real world
with commentary from an artist or fellow participants. In April of 2011, the augmented
reality artist BC “Heavy” Biermann used AR to superimpose the face of Goldman Sachs
CEO Lloyd Blankfein over the face of Geoffrey Rush’s Captain Barbossa on movie
posters for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The same effect could
have been accomplished with wheat paste and posters, as in traditional graffiti art, but

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Vincent 2016.
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this way there was nothing for Disney to erase or take down, making the art much more
difficult to shut down.
• Can potentially communicate how people view the world even more powerfully than
in VR. In the last chapter I criticized the hyperbolic claim that VR could let users “know
what it’s like to be Abraham Lincoln!” AR might actually be able to deliver on that claim.
Imagine an AR system that annotated everything in a space based on how different
people might see it. If the user were to walk into Times Square with such a headset and
then flip through these “interpretive lenses”, a white supremacist lens might annotate
anyone not white as “threat”, or a misogynist lens might annotate all women as “less than
human”. From a more positive angle, a lens designed for white supremacists or
misogynists might give human names and stories to everyone they might perceive as
“other”, nudging them out of their preconceptions. It could be a potentially very powerful
tool to view the exact same street as an old white man, a young African-American girl, a
middle-aged illegal immigrant, and so on.
Personally I find AR to be a strange beast, partly because it’s so loosely-defined. When I was at
the Annenberg Innovation Lab, we worked with Warner Bros. to develop an experience that
interrogated what exactly made a project ‘AR’. For this prototype, we explored how Google
Glass might be used for asymmetric synchronous TV experiences - in other words, how two
people might watch the same show on the same couch at the same time, but enjoy two different
experiences. In this prototype, by feeding the director’s commentary assets (audio, video, text
and/or image; in the case of our prototype, the picture-in-picture director’s commentary from
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes) to Glass, the Glass-wearer can experience the movie augmented
by the director’s commentary while the other person experiences only the movie.
A second concept posited two viewers, both wearing Glass, being fed different content from two
“commentator” characters via Glass. For example, an augmented mystery story might have one
viewer’s commentator whisper in their ear, “Character A is lying, because of X”, and a second
viewer’s commentator may whisper, “Character B is lying, because of Y”. At the end, the
viewers would work together to piece together what their commentators told them to crack the
case.
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This project shared a technical framework with the Annenberg Innovation Lab's Augmenting
Accessibility prototype, which sought to use wearable technology to provide users with
convenient access to additional language assets to help them more fully consume and engage
with whatever they're watching, on their own terms and through their chosen form of
communication. Both projects were developed by the AIL’s Lead Developer Aninoy Mahapatra
with Erin Reilly serving as a Creative Advisor, and the Augmenting Accessibility prototype was
overseen by Francesca Marie Smith. The project had its first public showing at the Innovation
Lab's 2014 Evening of Innovation on April 23, 2014.

How the AIL Augmented Storytelling prototype felt in Google Glass.
The Fragments experience for HoloLens does, however, point to a potential challenge for
advanced AR: while HoloLens’ spatial mapping technology does a good job of identifying the
class of a particular object (e.g., the couch the digital character is sitting on), it suggests a future
“uncanny valley” problem for AR experiences. In these early days of AR, the sheer novelty of
seeing a digital character sitting on my couch will be enough to make me forgive slight
discrepancies, such as the digital character hovering ever so slightly over the couch because the
hardware doesn’t perfectly take into account the dent my own butt has made in the couch’s
cushions over the years, or the digital character “sitting on” a particularly poofy couch without
the cushions yielding to the character’s weight. In order for advanced AR experiences to create a
truly convincing illusion of mixed reality, the hardware and/or software will need to be able to
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detect not only the class of object, but the particular material characteristics of that object. It
will need to integrate the two-way interaction between the characters’ and the real world’s
lighting and shadows. Otherwise, the effect is one of a ghost haunting one’s space – perhaps an
even more uncanny experience than the more ‘traditional’ unsettling “is it or isn’t it human”
discomfort we mean when we refer to the uncanny valley. That degree of real-time scanning and
rendering is not only going to require a significant amount of computing power, it’s going to
require a massive database of known objects, so the system knows that the digital character isn’t
just sitting on a couch, it’s sitting on a 2018 IKEA GRÖNLID sectional in Ljungen light green.
Perhaps my greatest concern about the future of augmented reality as a mass medium comes
from the precarious balance AR experiences need to strike between calling attention to the real-
world setting and making that setting vanish into the background of the story. In a way, this isn’t
that dissimilar from what stage designers have to do for theatrical productions: the set needs to
be evocative of the story’s setting without calling too much attention to its presence. An
experience like Fragments is compelling because of how it transforms the user’s living room into
a crime scene, but at some point the very fact that it is happening in the user’s living room
requires either a suspension of disbelief that this room is the user’s living room (that, for the sake
of the story, it’s a room that just so happens to have the same layout and contents of the user’s
living room, but is in fact a crime scene in, say, the French Quarter of New Orleans), or it
requires an in-fiction reason why it’s happening in the user’s own home. At some point this will
extend to a medium-wide form of literacy, either in the consumption or the creation (or, most
likely, both). Similarly, I wonder about the sheer breadth of experiences that can directly be
made to happen in the user’s own living room – surely only so many AR experiences can feature
tiny fairies, Smurfs, or talking mice scurrying between the user’s furniture? Once we’ve
experienced Globacore’s HoloLems (the classic Lemmings but done for the HoloLens, with the
green-haired little critters traipsing through your house), how many more variations on that
theme do we need before it begins to feel clichéd?
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Paterson 2017.
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Globacore’s HoloLems demo.

Connected Homes and Smart Cities
Connected homes and smart cities aren’t often considered fantastic mediums for storytelling, but
they both have a tremendous amount of potential for truly vast immersive experiences. The
notion of ‘ubiquitous computing’ describes a world where computing power isn’t contained
within a user’s computer or smartphone, but is instead distributed throughout the environment,
making that environment reactive to the user. More nefarious scenarios for this future are like the
famous scene Alex McDowell created for Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s John Anderson
is moving through a space and all the ads are customized specifically to him. More benevolent
versions include Sheriff Carter’s smart house S.A.R.A.H. (Self Actuated Residential Automated
Habitat) from Syfy’s Eureka, which became a character in her own right as the series progressed.

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John Anderton goes shopping at a reactive Gap in Minority Report.
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The smart home S.A.R.A.H. was the star of multiple episodes of Syfy’s Eureka.

A number of initiatives in recent years have begun to explore making connected homes and
smart cities into narrative or playable experiences. One early one was a partnership between
Disney and Philips, which connected a Philips Hue StoryLight to a Disney Storytime app on
iPhones or iPads. As the child or the parent “turns a page” in the app, the colored light from the
smart lamp changes to match the colors of the page.
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The Philips StoryLight and Disney Storytime app working in concert.

This was a fairly simple attempt to make a connected home part of a storytelling platform, but
it’s not very compelling. Similarly, both Amazon and Google are making strong pushes into the
connected home space with their Alexa and Google Home initiatives, but the storytelling/game
efforts on both platforms are still in early stages. As of this writing, these early experiments
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include Magical Adventure or The Magic Door for Amazon’s Alexa or Mickey Mouse Adventure
or Cars Adventure for Google Home, but these are all voice-only, and do not connect to such
potential extensions as lights, screens, or mechanical components designed specifically as
storytelling extensions. More adventurous innovators are pushing this concept much further.
Storytellers, entrepreneurs and media inventors Jonathan Belisle and Vincent Routhier are the
creators of ioTheatre, a platform that connects multiple sensors, triggers and mechanisms
together with a software kit to create scriptable interactions using the Internet of Things, which
has fantastic potential for smart home storytelling. Belisle and Routhier were research fellows at
the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and I enjoyed numerous conversations with them comparing
notes on our visions for this possible future. The aforementioned Lighthouse in the Woods
prototype I built at the Annenberg Innovation Lab was also an experiment in storytelling with
connected homes – if the picture frames in a house were all digital, then they could be used as
“surround screens” in an immersive, in-home storytelling experience. Jennifer Leigh Stein, the
first graduate of USC’s Media Arts and Practice PhD program, transformed the School of
Cinematic Arts’ newest building into a storytelling platform with her doctoral thesis project,
“PUCK: Place-based, Ubiquitous, Connected and Kinetic Experiences for Interactive
Architecture.” As Stein wrote:
As buildings become dynamic generators of data and information, they have the
opportunity to use their embedded technological systems to play a more
collaborative role in an inhabitant’s experience of space and place. This presents a
unique opportunity to conceptualize and design near-future situations and ambient
interfaces for interacting with the built environment. These new spaces of
possibility are imaginable by connecting people to now-common ubiquitous
computing technologies such as sensors, building management systems, and
mobile devices, and to the networks that make up a rapidly emerging connected
world.
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Similarly, there have been a number of initiatives working to turn cities into platforms for
storytelling and play. Some of these are very well-established forms: tours, for example, are a
great example of adding a narrative layer onto walking through a city. Michael Epstein, a fellow

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Stein 2011, p. 7.
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graduate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, has created a number of “Walking
Cinema” experiences that integrate walking tours with stories, including The Legend of Casteo,
which led “Venice Biennale audiences into the world of local crafts surrounding the
contemporary Venice Biennale contemporary art festival”, Posts from Gloucester, which told
“the story of a local artist rummaging through heroes, traditions, and changes in America’s oldest
fishing village”, and Murder on Beacon Hill, which extended a “PBS true-crime documentary
film into the streets of Boston”.
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A number of “Big Games” unfold across neighborhoods or
whole cities, and a (relatively) new movement pushing for a transition in thought from “smart
cities” to “playable cities” is being shepherded by the experimental arts group Watershed in the
UK; Stein is currently the Watershed Professor of Design Futures at the University of the West
of England. According to the Playable City website, “a Playable City is a city where people,
hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its
services, places and stories.”
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The Playable City initiative kicked off in 2012 with Watershed’s
Playable City Award; The Guardian described the winning entry, “Hello Lamp Post” by PAN
Studio, as follows:
This fascinating project encourages visitors and residents to communicate with
street furniture like lamp posts, post boxes and bus stops by using the repair
numbers found on these objects as SMS codes. Participants simply text the
relevant number to a central server thereby 'waking up' the object, which will then
ask a series of questions via text messaging. The next person to 'sign in' with that
object can learn about previous replies, and the idea is, regular 'conversations'
with the same objects will allow players to learn lots of stories about the hidden
lives of the city's population.
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http://www.walkingcinema.org
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https://www.playablecity.com/background/
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Stuart 2013.
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PAN Studio’s “Hello Lamp Post”.

These examples suggest that the affordances of connected homes and smart cities might include:
• Enable true 360-degree storytelling. Stories told in houses and cities are potentially
even more immersive than virtual reality. It may not be as perfectly immersive, since the
storyteller is at the mercy of a staggering number of potential variables outside of their
control (Weather! Traffic! Architecture!), but few things are as immersive as reality.
• Make the everyday extraordinary. Tours, whether they’re historic and educational or
fictional and entertaining, take the everyday world and invite audiences to perceive them
in a new way. Whether this is done through pure audio or rich augmented reality, the end
result is making audiences see the world around them with fresh eyes.
• Prompt interactions between citizens either simultaneously or asynchronously.
Much of the power of “Hello Lamp Post” was in how it used the smart city as a kind of
matchmaking service between its users, asking users for a bit of content in exchange for a
bit of content from a previous user. This approach is one way to make the city writable,
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as opposed to the read-only approach that is commonly taken by major corporate IOT
initiatives or governments. (See the BC “Heavy” Biermann example from the previous
section.)

Tangible Storytelling
Tangible storytelling, or storytelling with physical objects:
• Adds tactility. The most obvious affordance of tangible storytelling is there in the name:
it’s storytelling with tangible objects. The ability to touch and manipulate these ‘story
objects’ adds an additional sense of visceral reality to the storyworld, and invites the user
to more directly play with the storyworld. There is a joy to holding a diegetic artifact – an
object from a fictional storyworld that has been made real through a model, replica, or the
like.
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• Can add a multiple forms of interactivity. When we talk about ‘interactive narrative,’
we’re commonly referring to a kind of story where our choices determine how the story
unfolds. However, tangible storytelling can sometimes result in objects that reveal details
of a story or storyworld hidden in its details. By turning a toy or statuette this way or that,
we might discover some particular bit of information hidden in its design that reveals
something new. A puzzle box might contain a scrap of story, a replica Halo helmet might
contain a bit of story printed on the inside of its visor – or how toys are mixed and
matched can invite users/players to imagine their own scenarios for how these characters
might meet and interact.
• At the Annenberg Innovation Lab, we conducted several explorations into tangible
storytelling. For starters, we worked with FOX to explore how we might tell tangible
stories with 3D printers. Some experiments had already been done in this direction by
various companies – Makerbot had produced a book called Leo the Maker Prince

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One caveat: do not use the term ‘diegetic artifact’ in corporate meetings. I did that once in a meeting
with some Halo folks and was nearly laughed out of the room.
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illustrated with objects that had been produced on a Makerbot 3D printer, and readers
could download the digital files for those models and produce their own copies at home –
but we were more interested in ways the physical objects could have a meaningful
impact on the story experience itself. For the FOX project, we imagined a scenario where
FOX identified sets of nine friends who all enjoyed their (then-hit) show Sleepy Hollow.
FOX would partner with a 3D printing service provider like Staples or OfficeMax, and
then email each of those nine friends a 3D-printable file. They would each take their file
to the service provider, and there print out an object: one-ninth of a puzzle of the Sleepy
Hollow logo. The friends would all then assemble at a viewing party for the season
premiere of Sleepy Hollow, and would put their nine puzzle pieces together on a table.
For this next step, we called in BC “Heavy” Biermann for help: the friends would then
aim their smartphones at the assembled puzzle, and – if they’d put it together properly –
the app on the phone would recognize the pattern of the puzzle and unlock an exclusive
Sleepy Hollow webisode superimposed over the puzzle in AR.
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First the puzzle pieces would be printed out…
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…Then the pieces would be assembled…
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…And an exclusive webisode would be unlocked in AR.
The art of crafting experience pathways around objects is going to become increasingly valuable
as “smart objects”, or artifacts embedded with some type of technology and connected to the
Internet of Things, become more popular. In his 2014 book Enchanted Objects, MIT Media Lab
professor David Rose argues that we can start thinking of such objects as the modern-day
equivalent of the magical weapons and other items from storybooks. Just as Tolkien’s magic
sword Sting glowed blue when orcs were nearby, so too did the handle of the Ambient Devices
umbrella when rain was in the forecast (not coincidentally, Ambient Devices was Rose’s own
company).
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I anticipated the eventual wave of such smart toys as Skylanders and Disney Infinity by a decade in an
essay, "On Toys and Transmedia Storytelling," that I posted to my then-weblog “Tip of the Quill” on
April 28, 2004. Sometimes I still kick myself for not patenting the idea – however, I did go on to use this
as my (successful) application essay to MIT, so I definitely got my mileage out of it!
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Unconventional Media
unconventional - adj. Not conventional; not bound by or conforming to
convention, rule, or precedent; free from conventionality: an unconventional
artist; an unconventional use of material.
By unconventional media, I mean things that might not ordinarily be considered “media” but
have been repurposed by innovative storytellers for their projects. A few spectacular examples
from recent years include clothing, food, and locations.

Clothing
In 2006, designers Elan Lee and Shane Small launched EDOC Laundry, a transmedia story
experience that incorporated a line of t-shirts with keywords hidden in their designs (“EDOC”
being “CODE” backwards, naturally).

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As ARGNet’s Jackie Kerr summarized the experience, “The game itself is introduced through
the clothing line, each article unlocking a short video through an encoded passphrase found
somewhere on the item. The key to discovering a passphrase is added to the underside of the
front hem, spelling out ‘Nothing to Hide.’ Each passphrase can be entered into the hidden
section of the EDOC Laundry website, and a video plays, revealing a snippet of story.” That
story was a “rock n’ roll revision of the American Revolution,” with a band named Poor Richard
fighting for their independence against their label, Hanover Media. As Kerr wrote, “It’s history,
updated and smacked on its ass to be cool. […] Learning about the origins of the government
through a medium such as this makes EDOC Laundry more than just a fun past-time [sic], but
also a political statement and a serious game with a message, targeting the audience of today’s
politically disaffected, game-literate youth – get out, vote, and make a difference.”
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EDOC Laundry was sufficiently impressive that it caught the attention of TV super-producer
Anthony E. Zuiker, who incorporated it into an episode of his show CSI: NY, “Hung Out to Dry.”
The episode aired on October 11, 2006, and – naturally – EDOC Laundry promptly sold limited
editions of the four shirt designs created specifically for the episode.
So what does EDOC Laundry suggest that the affordances for clothing might be? Clothes:
• Are released as collections in waves. We talk about both clothes and TV shows in
“seasons” – so why not merge the two?
• Are tangible. As noted in the earlier section on tangible storytelling, physical objects
afford some very interesting opportunities. Clothing can be physically manipulated, so
story clues could be revealed if they’re folded, turned inside out, brought together with a
different piece of clothing, cut and stitched back together a different way, and so on.
• Can communicate to others that the wearer is interested in a storyworld, and invite
curiosity from those others about said storyworld. Clothing can be considered a form
of broadcasting, in that the wearer is transmitting a message to anyone who perceives
them. Fans frequently wear t-shirts, hats, or other articles of clothing bearing images,
phrases, or symbols from their chosen fandoms, which can result in a fellow member of
the same fandom recognizing them and flashing a smile, giving a high-five, a thumbs-up,

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Kerr 2006.
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a Vulcan salute, or any number of other signs of recognition and approval. A particularly
curious image can also provoke curiosity by the uninitiated, which can prompt a question
from the curious and a bit of well-intentioned proselytizing from the fan.

Food
On February 28, 2011, HBO and the transmedia experience and marketing company Campfire
Media launched The Maester’s Path, an experience promoting the first season of Game of
Thrones that included turning food trucks into a storytelling component.

Andrea Phillips summarized the experience in A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling as
follows:
The Maester’s Path marketing campaign for the HBO series Game of Thrones
was all worldbuilding, in a more literal sense than usual – Campfire Media
created a series of “sensory experiences” that evoked the world of Game of
Thrones, but didn’t convey anything about the plot or the characters. …The
campaign sent a select few bloggers gorgeous chests filled with aromatherapy-like
kits, each meant to provide the scent of a particular location in the show. So the
Crossroads Inn, a busy pub on two major roads, was represented by the aromas of
crusty bread baking on the hearth, the wooden beams the inn was built from, and
an imported pear brandy for the inn’s higher-class patrons.
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The Maester’s Path also included an online audio experience that created the
feeling that you were walking around the public room of that inn and
eavesdropping on the conversations of its patrons and staff; later, it added food
carts in New York and Los Angeles where fans could actually taste regional
cuisines from the story’s world. The overall effect was a very concrete sense of
the world that the show takes place in.
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The genius of leveraging the affordances of food trucks to extend the sensory experience of the
Game of Thrones story is similar to how theme parks can extend storyworlds through food,
lodging, and so on. I can report from personal experience that the second-longest line at
Universal Studios Hollywood’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, behind only the big Harry
Potter and the Forbidden Journey roller coaster, is the butterbeer cart.
What might the affordances of food as a storytelling medium be? Food:
• Can generate strong sense memories. Scent and taste are intricately tied to our memory.
A particular taste can evoke memories from decades ago, and having that taste be tied to
a particular storyworld can be extremely powerful.
• Can be deeply private, or highly social. Much like going to the movies, dining can be
something best experienced in the privacy of one’s own home or in isolation, or in large
groups.
• Can be wrapped in highly theatrical experiences. For some dining experiences, the
food is secondary to the theater of how that food is delivered. Part of the joy of an
experience like Medieval Times or a Renaissance Faire is eating a turkey leg with your
fingers and swilling your beverage of choice from a flagon, but that’s obviously only part
of it. The same goes for dining places like the Rainforest Café, the Hard Rock Café,
Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, the Three Broomsticks at the Wizarding World of Harry
Potter, and so on.

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Phillips 2012, p. 44.
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• Can drive fans to particular places. As mentioned above, the only place to experience
“official” butterbeer is the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Is that drink alone worth the
price of admission? Maybe so, maybe not – it depends on the fan.

Locations
Theme parks might have the most obvious advantage when it comes to using locations as
storytelling extensions. Places like The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the recreation of
Pandora from Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge parks at
Disneyland and Walt Disney World will give audiences a chance to step into those worlds with a
much greater sense of immersion than even virtual reality can afford.
However, a number of other story experiences are experimenting with location-based
entertainment outside of theme parks. Some of these are huge and corporate: Mattel’s line of
American Girl dolls not only has a significant number of narrative components, ranging from the
historical adventure books bundled with the original American Girl dolls to the Netflix show
based on the new contemporary “Wellie Wishers” sub-line, but as of this writing it also has 19
American Girl Place stores at high-end malls across the United States and another two in foreign
countries (one in Canada and another in the United Arab Emirates). These stores are temples to
the American Girl experience, with showcases for each of the historical dolls that tell more about
the girls’ stories (beside multiple shelves’ worth of accessories for each one, of course), areas of
the store set aside for the sub-lines and activities for American Girl doll fans and their dolls.
These physical stores offer a sense of history and community in a fully immersive, multi sensory
experience that websites cannot begin to approach.
Others are more artistic, such as the boom in immersive theater experiences since 2000,
including such works as Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell (a reinterpretation of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland) and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. As described by Andrea Phillips:
Sleep No More [is] a critically acclaimed theater performance by Punchdrunk,
which [since its opening in 2011 has] been shown in London, Boston and New
York. It’s a reimagining of Shakespeare’s MacBeth. During the show, the
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audience is dispersed across five floors of a “hotel,” each representing a different
place in the story world: a mist-wreathed graveyard with an iron fence; a loud
nightclub; a row of bathtubs in an insane asylum. The audience must wander
through these locations, sometimes stumbling on actors and watching the scenes
play out, as though they have become particularly voyeuristic ghosts. Just
performance art, right? Yes – until you learn that the show extends into some
puzzle-driven bonus material similar to an ARG. Transmedia or not? Hard to
say.
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Large theatrical productions have taken advantage of fixed locations for decades, as evidenced
by the enormous helicopter effect in Miss Saigon (which enjoyed a ten-year run on Broadway
from 1991 to 2001) or the multiple installation effects in the Cirque du Soleil shows in Las
Vegas (such as the water tank for O, which opened at the Bellagio in 1998 or the spectacular
rotating, tilting and lifting stage platforms for Kà, which opened at the MGM Grand in 2004;
both shows are still running as of this writing). However, shows like Then She Fell and Sleep No
More take special advantage of their locations by transforming their entire locations into sets that
the audiences then explore – hence the ‘immersive’ in ‘immersive theater’. For Sleep No More,
audiences are encouraged to poke around, opening doors and rummaging through drawers in
search of additional clues to the story.
Other experiences leverage locations in ways that border on augmented reality, without the use
of superimposed digital graphics. In 2011, the British independent games developer and
entertainment company Six to Start debuted Wanderlust, which used the location-based social
site Foursquare’s platform as a storytelling engine:
Imagine a book that could tell stories tailored to your location - stories that take
you from cafes to libraries to museums, not just in one city or one country, but
wherever you are in the world. Wanderlust is an experimental mobile storytelling
platform that works on all smartphones including iPhones, Android, and WebOS.
Using a simple web-based editing interface, writers can create stories that move
readers from location to location - but unlike previous location-based stories,

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Phillips 2012, pp. 33-34.
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these locations aren't fixed. Act 1 of a story could require readers to be in any cafe
in the world; and Act 2 could take place in any bar in the world. It's not just
location-based storytelling - it's atmosphere-based storytelling.
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Wanderlust launched with five stories from experimental storytellers: “Tourism” by Naomi
Alderman, “Tech” by Tom Chatfield, “Ivy” by Andrea Phillips, “In the Shadow of Her Tail” by
Matt Wieteska, and “South by Southwest” by Adrian Hon.
What might the affordances of locations include? Locations:
• Provide atmosphere. Obviously, one of the most remarkable affordances of theme parks
is that they can provide a fully immersive atmosphere, like a storyworld come to life. VR
might provide full 360-degree visuals unmarred by such interruptions as passing
airplanes (particularly anachronistic for places like Pandora or Pirates of the Caribbean)
or fellow park-goers, but theme parks can deliver a full-sensory experience with scents,
tastes, textures, temperatures and so on.
• Can be solitary or social. Going to a theme park or other location-based experience
alone, with a significant other, or with an entire family are radically different experiences.
The best theme parks, like Disneyland or Walt Disney World, offer parallel experiences
for multiple audience types (see the earlier “leveraging engagement” chapter), with
romantic experiences for couples, energetic and noisy experiences for kids, and reflective,
educational or relaxing experiences for solo, older, or particularly harangued park-goers.
• Can be highly tangible. Theme parks are fantastic for storyworlds that invite audiences
to touch stuff. True, such components must be designed to take a breathtaking amount of
abuse, but there is a real joy to being able to brush your fingertips over the stonework of
Hogwarts Castle at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter or the hull of the Millennium
Falcon at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
• Can be tightly controlled. In the earlier chapters on connected homes and smart cities
and augmented reality, I described location-based experiences that were laid on top of
existing places. Theme parks can actually build the places as part of the storytelling
experience. My favorite example of this is a particular experience designed by Disney’s

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https://www.sixtostart.com/onetoread/2011/introducing-wanderlust/
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Imagineers for EPCOT. Disney had observed that families visiting EPCOT frequently
suffered a particular problem: while the parents might be delighted with getting to
experience a taste of France, Germany, Italy, and so on (especially those for whom
international travel was never an option), all too frequently their kids were bored, bored,
bored. To solve this, the Imagineers considered the unique opportunities afforded by a
small world
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and designed a kids’ experience to match. What kind of characters travel
around the world having adventures? Spies! The Imagineers created an experience where
kids were given a handheld digital device and drafted into the service of a spy agency –
first with Kim Possible, and later with Agent P from Phineas and Ferb. As the kids
progressed through EPCOT with their parents, the digital device would deliver a series of
“missions” – puzzles that the kids would solve on the handheld devices. When the puzzle
was solved, the space around them would physically react, and give them a clue to where
they should go next. For example, the handheld device might direct the kids to a
particular location in EPCOT’s version of Venice. If the kids solved the puzzle correctly,
a small animatronic submarine would rise up out of the canal and give them instructions
to go to Germany next, before disappearing beneath the water again. When the kids and
their parents arrived in Germany, they would be given another puzzle to solve. When
they did, a nutcracker up on a shelf would come to life, its clacking jaws giving them the
next clue. A similar effect could be achieved using augmented reality overlays onto
buildings that the storyteller/game designer might not own out in the real world, but when
the physical location itself is fully owned and controlled by those creating the
experiences, a wide range of exciting opportunities begin to emerge.

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Dad joke gleefully intended.
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One puzzle in Agent P’s World Showcase Adventure triggered an appearance from Agent P.

Another triggered an appearance by the villainous Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz.
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Building Worlds for a Future of Ubiquitous Storytelling
Over the preceding chapters, you might have noticed some trends beginning to converge. Virtual
reality, augmented reality, connected homes and smart cities, and location-based entertainment
all center around different aspects of places. As more and more emerging media offer
opportunities to blur the lines between the real world and that of the story, it drives home the
importance of storytellers building storyworlds.
Which, of course, brings this book more or less full circle. Designing not just stories but worlds,
with the potential to support a vast number of interconnected stories, characters, objects, and
locations, is going to be a crucial skill as demand increases for virtual reality, augmented reality,
smart objects and other tangible storytelling, location-based entertainment, and beyond. Food,
clothing, smells, textures, all of these things will need to be taken into consideration, and each
world needs to be sufficiently differentiated from its closest competitors so that a user knows if
they’re stepping into Westworld or Cowboys versus Aliens, into Star Wars or Star Trek or Firefly.
I ended this chapter with theme parks, because in many ways I’m keeping a close eye on how
theme parks are evolving as an early prototype for this kind of ubiquitous storytelling. As of this
writing, Disney has announced sub-areas for their parks based on Star Wars and the Marvel
Cinematic Universe, and early reports are promising the ability for fans to step into those
storyworlds in ways never before imagined. Beth Deitchman from D23, the official Disney fan
club, describes Galaxy’s Edge as follows:
Guests will find themselves in the middle of the action, whether they’re piloting
the Millennium Falcon or aboard a Star Destroyer inside a hangar bay. “The scale
of this attraction is unlike anything that we’ve ever done before,” Chapek said of
the new lands, which raise the bar on everything that has come before.

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Walt Disney Imagineer Scott Trowbridge told Disney fans, “This is a living place,
a place where your choices matter.” Guests might see some “galactic credits”
come their way, or they could end up on the list of a local bounty hunter.
There’ll, of course, be a cantina for unique drink concoctions (including blue
milk!) with a familiar face playing DJ: the droid Rex—who’ll hopefully have
more success as a DJ than he did as a star speeder pilot for Star Tours. “What
could go wrong?” asked Trowbridge.
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Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge will also feature vendors selling stuff that you would only find in the
world of Star Wars, like a toydarian toy vendor (get it?) selling the “handmade” toys that kids a
long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away would play with.
⁠

The “handmade” toys a toydarian street vendor will sell at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.
230

Perhaps more impressive is the fully-immersive experience promised to be delivered by the Star
Wars-themed hotel attached to Galaxy’s Edge. According to Walt Disney World Resort’s
editorial content manager Jennifer Fickley-Baker:

229
Deitchman 2017.
230
Fickley-Baker 2018.
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This first-of-its-kind resort will combine luxury with complete immersion into an
authentic Star Wars story. Guests’ journey through space will start when everyone
departs together for a multiday Star Wars adventure by boarding a starship alive
with characters and stories that unfold all around them during a voyage through
the galaxy.
At the resort, guests immediately become active citizens of the galaxy and can
dress up in the proper attire. Every resort window will also have a view into space.
The opportunity for immersion at this resort will also stand out among all Disney
resorts around the globe, as it will be seamlessly connected to Star Wars:
Galaxy’s Edge at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, allowing guests a total Star
Wars experience.
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As Bryan Bishop wrote for The Verge:
Basically, Disney wants to build a Westworld for Star Wars fans.
That sounds like a bit of hyperbole on its face, but as described by Walt Disney
Parks and Resorts chairman Bob Chapek, the project amounts to almost exactly
that. “We are working on our most experiential concept ever,” he told the crowd
during a Saturday panel. “It combines a luxury resort with immersion in an
authentic environment.”
In this case, that environment would be a Disney World hotel, designed to look
like a massive starship, with views of outer space from every window. But it
wouldn’t just be a place for lodging on the way to Galaxy’s Edge; it would be an
area where guests could have actual interactive experiences as part of a narrative
storyline. “It will invite you to live your own dedicated, multi-day adventure in a
galaxy far, far away,” Chapek explained. Guests wouldn’t wear flip-flops and
shorts; they’d wear Star Wars costumes. They wouldn’t deal with hotel
employees; they’d interact with Star Wars creatures and droids. And over the

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Ibid.
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course of their stay, the story would unfold around them through a series of story
moments and interactions, letting them fall completely into a fictional world.
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This, of course, sounds an awful lot like buying a ticket to a fully immersive Star Wars ARG.
Which, also of course, is precisely the point. Those tickets won’t come cheap – an early survey
gauging potential interest among Disney fans for such an experience suggested that tickets for a
weekend in the world of Star Wars could run upwards of $1000 per guest. Bishop continues:
The immersive hotel concept isn’t being limited just to Star Wars, either. Chapek
also announced that Hotel New York at Disneyland Paris will be getting a
superhero makeover and turned into Hotel New York — The Art of Marvel.
While details were slim, the hotel will allow guests to peruse superhero artwork,
costumes, and props “in the style of a contemporary art gallery.” While that
doesn’t have the allure of a multi-day adventure like the proposed Star Wars
resort, it nevertheless demonstrates that the company is focused on monetizing its
rich variety of intellectual property in every way possible. If theme parks are the
inevitable future of franchise movies, then hotels, resorts, and every other facet of
Disney’s empire are an opportunity as well.
If there’s one big-picture takeaway from D23 Expo this year, it’s that Disney is
all-in on the concept of immersive entertainment, no matter the medium. From
Star Wars augmented reality and Marvel VR, to Galaxy’s Edge and the
immersive hotel concepts, the company is aggressively moving beyond the
confines of traditional, passive media — and it has both the resources and the
intellectual property to pull it off. But of all the different ideas discussed at the
convention, the one that felt the most groundbreaking was the one that also
sounded the simplest: visiting a spaceship where you can just live inside a Star
Wars story, no headsets or clunky technology required.
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This may be a future of storytelling that only a company the size of Disney can afford to build –
or maybe not. Over the preceding chapters I’ve pointed out again and again that low-cost media

232
Bishop 2017.
233
Ibid.
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like audio, print, and comics can build worlds just as successfully, if not sometimes more so,
than high-cost media like film, television or video games. Emerging media like virtual reality
and augmented reality will allow fans to step into their favorite worlds or merge those worlds
with their own, and the prices for creating and consuming both AR and VR are largely in freefall.
As I’ve also pointed out repeatedly throughout this book, the best practices for creating those
worlds and designing the experience for how those worlds unfold across multiple media are
effectively the same if the storyteller’s budget is a shoestring or a Scrooge McDuck-sized money
bin. Using these transmedia aesthetics to make the experience of moving from one medium to
another not just frictionless but a delight is the key to succeeding in this future of storytelling. All
of these media, with all of their various affordances, should be considered as paints on a palette –
it’s how the artist carefully considers how those paints are used in the composition of the overall
experience that will determine whether the overall experience is a mess or a masterpiece.

Action: Evaluating Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances
1. Choose a transmedia storyworld for evaluation. What are the multiple media it
uses to tell its story? Identify three examples where the storyworld makes
excellent use of the affordances of each medium. How does each example work
particularly well in that specific medium? Why would it not have worked as well
in a different medium?

Action: Creating Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances
1. Identify three key settings in your storyworld which could be translated into
location-specific experiences. Describe how these locations look and feel, what
makes them special, what happens there, etc. Enter into section 8 of your NDD.
2. Revisit the Artifacts section of your NDD with this new thinking in mind. Update
section 9 of your NDD as needed.
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3. Pick 3 media and map your media mix onto your franchise map. Explain why you
chose each medium for each story. Include one unconventional medium. Enter
into section 10.1 of your NDD.
4. Draft a distribution plan for your franchise. Explain your thinking. Enter into
section 10.2 of your NDD.

Example: Medium Specificity and Leveraged Affordances in Spookshow
For Spookshow, I wanted media that were low-cost and (relatively) easy for a single author to
produce, to demonstrate that transmedia storytelling is not the sole provenance of massive
studios. That kept me in the cooler end of the McLuhanian spectrum, but I also wanted
Spookshow to have a strong visual aesthetic that would unify its components. Therefore, I chose
a light animation (something more like a web animation or motion comic than a feature film), a
graphic novel, and an illustrated novella. I was also strategic about in what order I placed these
media in my ideal audience experience flow, and which parts of the story to tell in which
medium.
Animation
I began my ideal audience experience flow in animation, the warmest of my three chosen media
on the McLuhan spectrum, because in my four-step model of transmedia experiences
(Discover/Collect/Consume/React) animation is highly immersive and has a low degree of
transmedia resistance in consumption; everyone likes cartoons. Books have a smaller potential
audience than animation because reading takes more work. Basically, I wanted to minimize the
amount of labor required on the part of the audience and thus maximize the ease of entry into the
franchise, and maximize the potential audience size for its initial installment.
I also chose animation, especially over live action, because I want to have a consistent stylized
look and feel across the entire franchise. The idea here is similar to what Mike Mignola does in
Hellboy; if you create a highly stylized, largely abstract art style for your storyworld, it can
translate well across multiple media and, by starting at a lower-resolution, reduced figuration
(basically a caricature to start), when and if the story eventually migrates into higher-resolution
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medium like live-action film, then it’s easier for the characters to be designed in a way that’s
reminiscent of the originals. Frequently when a story begins in a film and then goes into lower-
resolution media, the character designers have to either inherently caricature the live actors, or
the renderings frequently miss their mark.
A third reason I chose animation was because some of the things I had in mind for the story
would really lend themselves well to motion. You can evoke motion in comics, as Scott
McCloud points to in great effect in Understanding Comics, but I had some very deliberate
motion shots I wanted to pull off – thus requiring a camera to move. In the opening scene, I
describe the camera following a bird down across the landscape and into the small town of
Bradbury, Illinois, because I wanted the “magical” sense of flying followed by, when one of the
pious members of the town tries to shoot the bird out of the sky, a similar sense of the danger of
fear. Later, I wanted another swooping shot of two of my characters, Shade and Gears, flying
high above the chaos of the spookshow under attack aboard one of Gears’ mechanical pegasi for
similar reasons, only in reverse – to go from the chaos at the ground level to a sense of
weightlessness above it. Similarly, much of the Spookshow, when it is introduced, needed to
evoke a sense of wonder and magic and possibility, much like that generated by a really
excellent Cirque du Soleil show. For that, I wanted either VR (for its sense of full immersion) or
animation or film, and for the zero-budget approach I wanted to maintain, animation was the
answer.
Comics
I placed the graphic novel second in my experience design because once the audience has been
enthralled by the animation, they will likely be more willing to invest a greater degree of energy
into a cooler medium. Comics are also a terrific option for transmedia stories because they are
affordable to produce – aside from how much you pay the talent, there is no difference in cost
between producing a deeply personal, realistic story like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and a
science fiction epic like Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples' Saga. (Ink is ink, after all.)
Comics also provide a great mix of the interiority of text – albeit in smaller doses, determined by
how many words can be squeezed into boxes – with striking, often spectacular visual imagery.
This enables transmedia storytellers to cheaply establish what their characters and settings look
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like, and set a visual tone that can be maintained across multiple media moving forward. The
story I wanted to tell in the second component, revealing Sebastian Shade’s motivations,
required a greater degree of interiority than necessarily afforded by animation. You can do
voiceovers in animation, but it’s a much more common practice in graphic novels, something I
chose to leverage here.
Illustrated Novellas
The illustrated novel came third for much the same reasons – by this point the audience should
be well and truly invested in the story, and thus the most willing to invest in a colder medium
like text; in many ways, text is the coolest medium of all. Text as a medium affords a high
degree of authorial control, which is amplified considerably by the raft of self-publishing
platforms that have emerged in recent years. Text also affords high degrees of emotional
engagement for relatively low production cost, and text offers the opportunity for heightened
interiority, or a greater degree of insight into how a main character thinks and feels about the
situations they find themselves in over the course of the story.
This was a crucial element for me, because at this point of the story I wanted the audience to get
deeply into the head of Kendra Smith/Kendra Vollmond. I wanted readers to feel her sense of
betrayal by Shade, to get a sense of how horrible her ongoing, permanent awareness of the
howling of those who perished because of her failure to prevent the Great Disaster, and thus to
transform the character from a borderline villainous one in the beginning into a sympathetic one
by the end. (See the “additive comprehension” section below.)
I could have done this in a different medium, but text seemed like the perfect marriage of power
to cost, while remaining highly accessible to a broad audience. As mentioned earlier, virtual
reality filmmaking is attempting to move increasingly in this direction, taking notes from first-
person video games like Myst or Halo, but a first-person camera is not the same as a first-person
perspective in literature. For stories that require a deep degree of reflection and inner emotional
tension, text may be an excellent candidate. However, text can suffer from a relatively small
market, as its coolness as a medium also requires a relatively significant amount of work on the
part of the audience.
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Moving Forward: Audio
I’m already sketching out plans for a second wave of components, and I expect audio will be a
key part of that expansion. Audio is extremely attractive as a component for this franchise not
only because it’s so affordable to produce (which is in line with my original constraints, and
obviously doesn’t hurt), but because audio is an extraordinarily powerful medium. Audio is
arguably our oldest medium (speech presumably predating symbols), and it can be extremely
evocative, triggering deeply emotional responses though music, sound effects, the spoken word
or voice acting and performance – all of which can, of course, be combined to great effect.
On a McLuhanian scale, audio is warmer then pure text, but it is still a very cool medium, as it
relies a great deal on the imagination of the audience to "complete" the experience, filling in the
visuals themselves. However, as already noted, this helps make audio a great choice for
storytellers on a budget as it does not require the high expense of visual assets and increasingly
powerful smartphones are effectively placing a recording studio in everyone's pocket. Further,
the audio drama is enjoying a renaissance thanks to the stratospheric popularity of Serial, Lore,
Limetown, The Signal, Welcome to Nightvale and other podcasts. The production complexity of
such podcasts run approximately the same gamut as radio broadcasts; they can be produced by a
single individual doing everything from writing to performance – the equivalent of a ham radio
operator – or they can be a professional multi-cast affair with original music, sound effects, post-
production, and so on – the equivalent of an NPR series or BBC radio drama – depending on the
demands of the production. However, even a "blockbuster" audio production like Serial might
only find an audience that's a small percentage of what it might find in a more visual medium
(which is why the most successful podcasts, like Aaron Mahnke's Lore, frequently begin
branching out into books and television), and podcasts struggle with discoverability, as they lack
radio's ability to find an audience through over-the-air broadcasting, frequently to captive
audiences trapped in their cars.
Moving forward, the idea is to continue the story in similar transmedia bursts, with the
“mothership” of the story unfolding in an episodic animated series that could run from 1928
through the beginning of World War II in 1939, and beyond. Each major milestone in that series
(e.g., the beginning of a second season) could be accompanied by the release of additional stories
set in the past, with tales that add significantly to how the audience understands that new chapter
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in the tentpole narrative, similar to how each season of Lost was accompanied by transmedia
extensions and intra-episode scenes that leapt forwards and backwards in time.

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10. Collaborative Authorship, Clear Canon(s) and Multiplicity
Three closely interrelated concepts that are a real test for the long-term viability of a
transmedia-ready storyworld are collaborative authorship, clear canon(s) and multiplicity.
Collaborative authorship is both a technique and a philosophy. Regarding the technique,
having a singular ‘auteur’ associated with a vast storyworld that literally ‘authorizes’ or
blesses every component can translate into decreased transmedia resistance, as evidenced
by the sales spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics when Joss Whedon stepped in to
create Dark Horse’s ‘Season 8’ of the story in comics. However, this is a useful myth, as
even a highly auteur-driven show like Buffy had multiple authors working in collaboration,
with various screenwriters writing various episodes. Transmedia storyworlds are
frequently created by multiple authors working in multiple media, usually in whichever
medium is each author’s specialty. Such teams frequently have a central narrative design
document that serves as a shared reference guide, blueprint, or rulebook to help coordinate
the disparate components and disparate creative teams, like the internal Holocron for the
Star Wars story teams.
As a philosophy, a storyworld’s likelihood of enduring success can be improved by the
author’s embracing audience participation. The degree of this collaboration can vary from
conservative to very liberal. At the conservative end of the spectrum, some authors
introduce frameworks into their storyworlds that invite audiences to imagine who they
would be in those storyworld, as J.K. Rowling invited readers of Harry Potter to imagine
which house the Sorting Hat would put them into at Hogwarts, or Philip Pullman
prompted readers of The Golden Compass to imagine what form their shapeshifting animal
daemon would take. At the liberal end of the spectrum, some storytellers create worlds and
invite other storytellers in to tell their own stories, like George R. R. Martin did with the
Wild Cards short story anthologies, Stan Lee and his collaborators did with the Marvel
Universe in comics, or H.P. Lovecraft did with the Cthulu mythos.
Such a collaborative approach immediately provokes audiences to wonder how to resolve
the inevitable conflicts between multiple authors’ stories. Again, this is where a central
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narrative design document can be useful to collaboratively create a storyworld with a clear
canon. However, strict adherence to such a canon can be stifling to a storyworld’s
development. Many of the world’s most vibrant storyworlds, like those in Marvel or DC
Comics, have evolved over decades using a more folkloric approach, with particular
authors either rewriting particular aspects of a character’s history or radically reinventing
a character to address a new audience. When multiple versions of a character or
storyworld are created, transmedia resistance can be steep if it’s not made clear which
version is which. This is why the clear differentiation in branding between the DC Comics
version of Superman and the version introduced in the WB’s Smallville is important – it
helped clarify to fans of each that the story in each version was separate and distinct – two
clear canons.
This ability of these two versions to stand side-by-side is called multiplicity. If a storyworld
is designed with sufficiently robust unique storyworld characteristics, and/or with a
sufficiently robust central deviation from reality, then the storyworld can be remixed into a
different version for a different audience, whether that’s a markedly different demographic
(such as how the Superman mythos was remixed for an older female audience in The New
Adventures of Lois and Clark or a teenaged female audience in Smallville), for a different
country and culture (as the Spider-Man mythos was remixed for a South Asian audience in
Spider-Man India), or just for the thrill of imagining a radically different interpretation of
the character (as the Batman mythos was remixed into the ‘Victorian England Batman’
story Gotham by Gaslight or the ‘Batman as a vampire’ story Batman: Red Rain). These
reimaginings are still recognizable as versions of the original, while still being enjoyable as
their own creations.

Collaborative Authorship
It’s fitting that we begin and end this list of transmedia aesthetics with a focus on audiences,
because in so many ways the audience is the alpha and the omega of any storyteller’s project. To
succeed as a storyteller, you must first be able to read your audience up front, to identify what
kind of a story they would love to hear. As you go, you must deliver an experience that is
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constantly engaging, providing a constant set of imaginative prompts (“What might happen?”)
and delightful payoffs (“Here’s what happened!”) that are each a form of invitation for the
audience’s imagination to participate and play, and once the story is completed the truly
successful storyteller will have their audience immediately clamoring for more – more from the
storyteller, more of that story with its characters and its world, more of that kind of enjoyment
and delight.
This is a pretty middle-of-the-road description of the pas de deux between storytellers and
audiences. A very conservative (and egotistical) storyteller might hold that the audience is there
to experience whatever the storyteller tells them, and said audience has no input in the
experience. A very liberal (and collaborative) storyteller might hold that the stories they tell are
completely open to audience interpretation, reinterpretation, and reinvention – and the audiences
have just as much claim to the imagined worlds as the storytellers do, as the storytellers are
merely a conduit for a larger cultural imagination.
In my opinion both perspectives are valid, even if those who hold them might clash fiercely over
which is “correct”.

The Conservative Perspective: Who Writes the Bible?
To my mind, authors are perfectly within their rights to fiercely protect their creations, as they
are their creations. Further, there is a very real, tangible value to having an “author” to big
storyworlds. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on the air, Dark Horse published a traditionally
licensed Buffy comic – that is, one that was produced with little to no creative involvement from
the creative team on the show. The last episode of the TV show was on May 20, 2003, and the
final issue of this original series was published in November of 2003. Four years later, in 2007,
Dark Horse launched a new series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics billed as a canonical
continuation of the show, picking up where the 7
th
season of the show left off. This “Season 8”
was produced under the creative direction of Buffy’s creator Joss Whedon, with the first arc
written by Whedon himself. The resulting sales numbers are a testament to the value the
audience placed on Whedon’s authorship:
Long 406

As William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson wrote in The Many Lives of the Batman:
Consider, for example, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Philip Marlowe.
Despite these characters' appearances in films, and even their continuation in
literary form beyond their creators' deaths, their central identity resides in a series
of literary urtexts penned by single authors and set in single time periods. Hence,
were one seeking to define Sherlock Holmes, one would turn not to the latest in a
series of numerous pastiches but would turn to the fifty-six short stories and four
novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written between 1887 and 1927.
234

However, as with Holmes, Bond, and Marlowe, the most long-lasting stories – those which
transcend the single telling and evolve into the more folkloric “cultural touchstones” as Star
Wars or Batman, are told and retold and re-retold over many years, in many cultures. In Building
Imaginary Worlds, Mark J.P. Wolf calls such stories and storyworlds transauthorial:
235

234
Uricchio and Pearson 1991.
235
To the best of my knowledge, Wolf coins the term “transauthorial” here.
Long 407
Another way that imaginary worlds differ from traditional media entities is that
they are often transnarrative and transmedial in form, encompassing books, films,
video, games, websites, and even reference works like dictionaries, glossaries,
atlases, encyclopedias, and more. Stories written by different authors can be set in
the same world, so imaginary worlds can be transauthorial as well.
236

For an author to create a vast storyworld single-handedly requires that author to be exceptionally
multi-talented, highly entrepreneurial, and intensely prolific – and even then, at a certain point
most such creators wind up needing to hire help.
Comics are terrific as an art form that affords a high degree of control to creators who are
sufficiently talented as both writers and illustrators, but many of the most famous writer-
illustrators have collaborators toiling away outside of the spotlight. Jeff Smith is famous for
Bone, but he is the first to say that he could never have done it without the help of his wife
Vijaya, who ran the business side of Smith’s self-publishing company Cartoon Books. Dave Sim
is famous for his 300-issue series Cerebus, but after the 65th issue Sim brought on the artist
Gerhard to do the backgrounds, which are beautifully intricate and detailed studies in lines and
shadows. Mike Mignola is famous for writing and illustrating his masterpiece series Hellboy, but
he was assisted in creating the first issues by comics legend John Byrne and the colorists Mark
Chiarello, James Sinclair, and Matthew Hollingsworth, and starting in issue 14 Mignola was
joined by his long-running colorist Dave Stewart. Over the years Mignola took on a number of
other collaborators, including Duncan Fegredo (who provided the art for several major Hellboy
arcs), the legendary horror comics artist Richard Corben, his writing partners for spin-off series
B.P.R.D. John Arcudi and Scott Allie, longtime B.P.R.D. artist Guy Davis, and, of course,
director Guillermo del Toro worked with Mignola for Del Toro’s adaptations of Hellboy into
feature films.
Similarly, books are primarily considered the works of a single author, but in Historicizing
Transmedia Storytelling, Matthew Freeman outlines the artist-entrepreneurial approaches taken
by both Frank L. Baum for The Wizard of Oz and William S. Burroughs for Tarzan, and in
Transmedia Archaeology Paolo Bertetti describes the approach taken by Robert E. Howard and

236
Wolf 2012, p. 3.
Long 408
his estate for Conan the Barbarian, all of which resulted in the transformation of a single-author
story into a transauthorial franchise. As Freeman writes, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ brilliant move to
incorporate himself and incorporate franchising, sponsorship and merchandising "equipped
Burroughs with a heightened author-function, bringing with them new strategies for holding
story worlds together and for pointing audiences across multiple media".
237
This process is in full
swing in contemporary publishing, with Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum calling James Patterson,
“the world’s best-selling author since 2001” and “the Henry Ford of books”
238
and Forbes’
Lauren Streib saying of Patterson, “Patterson's not a writer. He's a fiction (and non-fiction)
factory,”
239
both pointing to Patterson’s approach of bringing on numerous co-writers to take his
outlines and hammer them out into full books, which will feature Patterson’s name in very large
letters on the top and the co-authors’ names in much smaller letters somewhere below. As with
Whedon, Baum, Bertetti and Howard, past a certain point an author ceases to be ‘just an author’
and mutates into a brand. This is, as Freeman points out, precisely what happened with Baum:
In later years posters advertising Baum’s novels commonly emphasised colour
and spectacle while using Baum as the ‘character’ that linked each of these
various novels together. In one example from 1901, a poster labelled ‘L. Frank
Baum and His Popular Books for Children’, advertising a number of Baum’s
works including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Army Alphabet (1900), Mother
Goose in Prose (1897) and Father Goose (1899), Baum’s name and image were
centralised in the middle of the poster as the primary selling feature, with the
author’s various stories scattered around the edge of the poster, each grouped by
colour.
240

According to the New York Times' Jonathan Mahler,
[Patterson] is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for
each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of

237
Freeman 2016, p.109.
238
Purdum 2014.
239
Streib 2009.
240
Freeman 2016, p.78.
Long 409
collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it’s
certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a
novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or
plotting an episode of 24. Books, at least in their traditional conception, are the
product of one person’s imagination and sensibility, rendered in a singular,
unreproducible style and voice. Some novelists have tried using co-authors,
usually with limited success. Certainly none have taken collaboration to the level
Patterson has, with his five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different
Patterson series or genre. [...] The way it usually works, Patterson will write a
detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his
co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary,
rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will
typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes
more efficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult
side, his collaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A.
side, they sometimes work with Patterson’s young-adult editor, who decides when
pages are ready to be passed along to Patterson.
241

Just as Patterson has multiple teams working in multiple genres, transmedia storytelling often
involves multiple teams working in multiple media. The Matrix franchise, for example, involved
development teams for the games, for the films, for the animations, for the comics, for the
websites, and so on, all working to build out the vision that the Wachowski siblings had sketched
out for them. Keeping so many disparate teams on the same page can be a real challenge. It’s no
accident that the Narrative Design Document you’ve been developing over the course of this
book feels quite a bit like a guidebook for a Dungeons & Dragons-style tabletop role-playing
game. Those guidebooks are essentially guidelines for how multiple storytellers (both dungeon
masters and players) can create their own works inside the framework of the Dungeons &
Dragons universe. Story bibles for TV shows or video games follow the same patterns for the
same reasons – so multiple writers or game designers working in the same franchise can create
new stories, new experiences in close or loose collaboration with each other that all add up to

241
Mahler 2010.
Long 410
something greater than the sum of its parts. Taking the time at the outset to set down the rules,
histories and general character of the world in which each of these extensions is set goes a long
way toward maintaining a sense of consistency across the franchise.
242

Creating such documents is also crucially important because the collaborators on these
storyworlds are rarely all in the same place. The term “writer’s room” conjures up an image of a
vibrant, jovial environment with a bunch of notes posted up on the walls around the room. And
yeah, sometimes you get that. Or something close to that, at least. More frequently, however,
what you get is a bunch of writers scattered around the world. Especially in the world of
transmedia franchises, you commonly have multiple teams in multiple rooms around the world,
including tie-in novelists like Matt Forbeck or Chuck Wendig working in their own home offices
in places like Minnesota or, in Wendig’s case, “the forests of Pennsyltucky”.
243
This is a major
reason why the ability to collaborate effectively is a must – not just understanding version
control software or Google Docs, but the fine art of making something together in a team.

The Liberal Perspective: Storyworlds as Communal Playgrounds
When groups of people work together to create a storyworld with equal authorship, the results
can be magical, chaotic – or a mixture of both. In 1985, the science fiction authors Gail Gerstner
Miller, Victor W. Milán, John J. Miller, Melinda M. Snodgrass and Walter Jon Williams were
deeply engaged in an extended campaign of Steve Perrin’s tabletop role-playing game
Superworld, with George R. R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) serving as the dungeon master.
Together, the players developed a dark, gritty alt-history storyworld filled with superheroes,
somewhat akin to what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons would create with DC Comics’
Watchmen in 1986. Moore wanted to write stories about his own character, Turtle, and invited
the other authors to do the same, with the goal of creating a shared-world anthology of these

242
Canon and continuity are key – while strict continuity may feel constrictive, wantonly breaking these
things is as dangerous as misrepresenting a recurring character. This is perhaps the worst kind of
transmedia resistance. Audiences may have their suspension of disbelief shattered, which then lessens
their investment in the narrative franchise. Dissatisfaction results not only in lost interest, but lost revenue
for the franchise as well.
243
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/
Long 411
short stories. They extended the call to other authors, including Edward Bryant, Pat Cadigan,
Chris Claremont, Stephen Leigh, Lewis Shiner, Howard Waldrop, and Roger Zelazny, and the
first anthology, Wild Cards, was published by Bantam Books in 1987.
This wasn’t the first shared world in literature, of course; Martin himself points to such
predecessors as Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World; the universes in Marvel and DC Comics; the
Cthulu Mythos spawned by H.P. Lovecraft and shared with Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton
Smith, Robert Block, and August Derleth; Harlan Ellison’s Medea: Harlan’s World; plus the
1980s boom in shared worlds that included Ithkar, Liavek, Merovingen Nights, Borderlands, The
Fleet, War World, Greystone Bay, and Heroes in Hell.
244
According to Martin, however, Wild
Cards was attempting something novel and even more complex:
A shared world poses some difficult artistic questions, the most crucial one being
the amount of sharing involved and the rules that govern it. All of the shared
worlds of the ‘80s answered these questions in their own ways, I found, but some
of the answers were more satisfactory than others. […] The best shared world
anthologies, the ones that were the most entertaining and the most successful,
were those that shared characters and plots as well as settings. In those books, and
those alone, the whole was more than the sum of its parts. The “shared worlds”
that minimized the sharing were missing the point of the exercise, it seemed to me.
Wild Cards would not make that mistake, I decided. We would maximize the
sharing. More, we would strive to go well beyond what anyone else had ever done
in the shared world game. So much so that when I drew up my “immodest
proposal” for the first three Wild Cards books, I eschewed the old term “shared
world” and promised the publishers a series of “mosaic novels.” […] The first two
volumes of that first triad (which would eventually become Wild Cards and Aces
High, although they had other titles in the proposal) would feature individual
stories, each with its own plot and protagonist, a beginning, a middle, and an end.
But all the stories would also advance what we called the “overplot.” And

244
Martin 2007, p. 21.
Long 412
between the stories we would add an interstitial narrative that would tie them all
together and create the “mosaic novel” feel we wanted.
But the true mosaic novel would be the third book, wherein we brought our
overplot to a smashing conclusion. No other shared world had ever attempted
anything quite like what we proposed to do with Jokers Wild: a single braided
narrative, wherein all the characters, stories and events were interwoven from
start to finish in a sort of seven-handed collaboration. The end result, we hoped,
would be a book that read like a novel with multiple viewpoints rather than
simply a collection of related stories. […] Each of the seven viewpoint characters
had his dreams, his own demons, and his own goals, the pursuit of which would
take him back and forth across the city, up skyscrapers and down into the sewers,
bumping into other characters and other stories as he went.
It was seven stories and it was one story, but mostly it was one enormous
headache. I did a lot of cutting and pasting and shuffling of sections as the
manuscripts came in, striving for the perfect placement of all our cliffhangers,
climaxes, and foreshadowing while simultaneously trying to keep chronology and
geography firmly in mind. […] In truth, we were creating a new literary form of
sorts, though none of us quite realized that at the time. We did realize that what
we were doing was an experiment, and there were days when none of us were at
all certain that the beast was going to fly. It was the hardest, most challenging
editing that I ever did, and the writing was no day at the beach either.
In the end, though, all the effort was worth it. Readers and reviewers both seemed
to love the mosaic novel form (although one reviewer amused me vastly by
making a point of how seamlessly I had blended the styles of such dissimilar
writers, when of course I’d made no attempt to “blend” any styles whatsoever,
preferring that each character retain his own distinctive individual voice).
And my writers and I agreed: Jokers Wild was the strongest volume in the series
to date. The experiment had been a success, and the template was set. The full
mosaic was too difficult and time-consuming a form to be used in every volume,
Long 413
but every third volume was just about right. So the template was set: all the Wild
Cards triads to come would also conclude with a climactic mosaic, fully
interwoven in the same manner as Jokers Wild.
245

As of 2018, 26 books in the Wild Cards series have been published across four publishers
(including multiple novels scattered among the anthologies), plus a multi-author blog and
another 11 short stories. The group of authors co-creating the Wild Cards universe, known as the
Wild Cards Trust, is, as of this writing, up to forty-one, with Martin serving as the editor.

The Middle Ground: Storyworlds as Invitations to Play
Many of the most immersive storyworlds deliberately and strategically incorporate provocations
for audiences to participate more actively in those worlds. As J.P. Wolf summarizes Umberto
Eco:
…Imaginary worlds invite audience participation in the form of speculation and
fantasies, which depend more on the fullness and richness of the world itself than
on any particular storyline or character within it; quite a shift from the traditional
narrative film or novel.
246

It’s no accident that the Wild Cards universe was born out of a tabletop role-playing game: the
worldbuilding for a vast storyworld is similar to the authoring of a Dungeons & Dragons
guidebook. Think back to the first time you encountered the houses of Hogwarts in Harry Potter;
you almost certainly wondered into what house the Sorting Hat would place you. Because J.K.
Rowling did such a robust job in describing the defining characteristics of each of the four
houses, this is a fun question to answer – and one fans can use to more deeply participate in that
storyworld. Paired with the symbology, color palette and “house pride” wearable elements in that
storyworld (e.g., the house color-striped scarves worn by the students), Gryffindor, Hufflepuff,
Ravenclaw and Slytherin became invitations for fans to play. The same goes for other
storyworlds – in Star Wars, the “character classes” of Jedi, Sith, bounty hunter and so on serve as

245
Martin, 2007, pp. 21-23.
246
Wolf 2012, p. 13.
Long 414
provocations for audiences to imagine what type of character they would be in that world. In The
Golden Compass and the rest of the His Dark Materials series, Philip Pullman gave all of his
characters animal “daemons,” whose form reflected some key characteristic about each
character’s personality – and instantly prompted every reader or viewer to wonder what form
their own daemon would take.
247
In Star Trek, the uniforms of the crew are color-coded (blue for
science, gold for command, red for sacrificial lambs, etc.), which, just like the scarves in Harry
Potter, permit fans to dress up not just as characters in the storyworld, but as who they would be
in that storyworld – in other words, as themselves in that world.
The structuralists among you are likely to draw connections between this active engagement and
the ‘writerly texts’ of French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. In his 1970 text S/Z,
Barthes draws a distinction between the scriptible and the lisible, or ‘writerly’ texts and ‘readerly’
texts – writerly texts, according to Barthes, are those texts that rely heavily upon the audiences to
provide any semblance of meaning, while readerly texts are those that require very little work on
the part of the audience and afford very little room for individual interpretation. Barthes admits
that examples of writerly texts are difficult, if not impossible, to find, and that they exist
primarily as a utopian model. Readerly texts, by contrast, “make up the enormous mass of our
literature”.
248
In his essay “The Death of the Author”, Barthes advocated divorcing the author
from the text and leaving the meaning of the text to be determined by the readers; not
surprisingly, Barthes places writerly texts far above readerly texts in his hierarchy of value.
Part of Barthes’ reasoning for this was the high degree of ideological power, and thus social
danger, was loaded into writerly versus readerly texts. In his 1975 book The Pleasure of the Text,
Barthes described the more prescriptive, assertive writing he perceived in readerly popular
culture as doxa and the more neutral, writerly writing he argued to be more conductive to critical
thought as para-doxa. In effect, readerly doxa texts told readers how and what to think, and
writerly para-doxa texts invited or prompted readers to think.

247
A savvy marketing team for the film version of The Golden Compass turned this into a popular web
quiz app in 2007. http://www.neatorama.com/2007/12/06/golden-compass-meet-your-own-daemon-test/
248
Barthes 1984, p. 5.
Long 415
As storytellers and world-builders, this can translate into heightened engagement as a more
writerly approach can also function as an invitation to play. According to Peter Hutchinson,
Indeed, practically all texts have playful elements in them to the extent that they
tease, frustrate, deny information, make suggestions, above all, that they
challenge the reader, and the zest to create makes itself felt far more clearly in
those sections of a text in which such activities are taking place. Playful writing
demands a different set of effort from the reader than does standard prose. This,
then, may be seen as another form of literary play: it is provocative, seeking to
arouse speculation, reflection or deduction.
249

I agree with Barthes – up to a point. Increasing the amount of reader engagement through
techniques like the strategic inclusion of negative space can make a text more ‘writerly’, or, as
Marshall McLuhan might have argued, can make it more ‘cool’ or ‘low-definition’ as it requires
more work on the part of the audience. However, I disagree with Barthes’ privileging the agency
of the reader over the skill of the author. As Hutchinson suggests, and as I noted at the beginning
of this chapter, any story is a fine, subtle pas de deux between storyteller and audience. Rather
than promoting one at the expense of the other, as Barthes seems to do in his championing of
writerly texts, I view stories as collaborative communications between a transmitting party and a
receiving party. Constructing a text is, therefore, carefully crafting a collection of concepts
chosen to best represent a message, or an experience, that the author wishes to convey in the way
that the author wishes it to be conveyed. I agree with Barthes that the reader plays a critical role,
and that no two readers are likely to derive precisely the same meaning from the same text. I
disagree, however, with the resulting value judgments, such as the derisive comments Richard
Howard makes in his preface to the 1974 Richard Miller translation of Barthes’ S/Z: “If we were
to set out to write a readerly text, we should be no more than hacks in bad faith”.
250
I find this to
be overly unkind. I think that a writerly text is simply a different type of object than a readerly
text, not an inherently better one, in the same way that impressionist art is simply a different type
of art than the works of the baroque era. If we were to follow Barthes’ logic out to its illogical
ends, then by reductio absurdum we can disprove Barthes’ declaration that ‘writerly’ texts

249
Hutchinson 1983, p. 13.
250
Barthes 1984, p. xi.
Long 416
cannot be found in bookstores – indeed, the ideal writerly texts are the blank books near the
registers of any Barnes and Noble.
To put it another way, the decision to create a writerly or readerly text isn’t so much a question
of creating works of varying quality, but creating experiences of a different nature. Stating that a
writerly text is inherently better than a readerly one is akin to claiming that a video game is
inherently better than a film because of its interactivity, or, more directly, that a radio drama is
better than a film because of its increased degree of involvement for an audience. Hardcore fans
of these media will make these arguments, to be sure, but that’s a recursive argument. (“Video
games are better than novels because they’re interactive!” “What makes you say so?” “Because I
like interactivity!” “Well, there you go.”) I do, however, believe that an otherwise readerly text
can often be improved by making it more writerly – and, as I think Barthes’ own writing proves,
very writerly texts can also often be improved by making them more readerly.
One example of ‘writerly’ texts in popular media can be found in horror. In his 1981 rough guide
to the horror genre Danse Macabre, Stephen King broke down 'scary' into three degrees: terror,
horror, and revulsion. Working from simple to complex, revulsion is the plain-and-simple gross-
out: the squish of a thumb plunging through an eyeball, or the splutch of an alien's crown
bursting through a man's chest. Horror works on a slightly more complicated level, as the
demonstration of something physically wrong: the shuffling, dragging step of a zombified loved
one, treading slowly to keep their parts from dropping off, or a baseball diamond crafted from an
eviscerated corpse with a cheerful pitcher weighing the corpse’s head in his glove. Finally, terror
is the “finest” type of spook-out, because it operates almost exclusively within the imagination of
the audience. According to King:
The finest [level] is terror, that emotion which is called up in the tale of The Hook
and also in that hoary old classic, "The Monkey's Paw". We actually see nothing
outright nasty in either story; in one we have the hook and in the other there is the
paw, which, dried and mummified, can surely be no worse than those plastic
dogturds on sale a