transmedia narrative

Blaseball, a fantasy baseball simulator developed by The Game Band, took 2020 by storm, quickly developing from a niche web game to an legitimate cultural phenomenon, including a whole catalogue of fan-created merchandise, more than a dozen albums of music, including a musical, and a dedicated following of players from around the world. Much of the attraction of the game comes from the passionate involvement of the fans and the openness The Game Band have shown to players making the game their own.In this paper, I demonstrate how The Game Band and players make use of the affordances of web browsers as a platform to create an inclusive space for play where each player can enjoy the game in their own way without precluding or diminishing other ways of playing Blaseball. The specific examples I examine are the use of a minimalist, text-forward approach to the game in a way that gives players licence to imagine a diverse, inclusive league of Blaseball characters; the development of "forbidden knowledge" as a way to include players with an interest in spoilers without alienating those who wish to avoid this information; and the player-led creation of a wiki that supports simultaneous-yet-mutually-exclusive descriptions of characters and events in the game, which allows the community of fans to enjoy a variety of interpretations of the minimalist events of the game without excluding any other faction of the fanbase.In using a minimalist, text-forward approach to game development, The Game Band not only created a low-cost, quick-to-iterate game by excluding the time- and labour intensive components of visual art, video, and audio elements; they also created an opportunity for fans to develop their own visions of the in-game characters and events without being limited by canonical race, gender, or sexual orientation. This seemingly-practical choice for a project from a small team is in fact pivotal to the game’s inclusiveness.Given the easy access to the game's code that web browsers offer, it was inevitable that players would explore and try to divine how the game works. While such behaviour could be seen as cheating, in Blaseball the interaction with the game’s code and data is part of the experience. In response to the grey area such interactions exist in, The Game Band and players developed the idea of "forbidden knowledge"— knowledge players had back-door access to but hadn't been made public by the game itself. I examine the concept of forbidden knowledge within the context of traditional methods of cheating, as studied by Mia Consalvo, and demonstrate how forbidden knowledge, as a social practice, is an inclusive response.Finally, I demonstrate how players make use of the mutability of web content to allow multiple visions of the same game to coexist in the form of the Blaseball wiki. This wiki loads random fan-generated player backstories every time the page refreshes so that no single vision of the game dominates all others.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Postdigital Storytelling offers a groundbreaking re-evaluation of one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of creativity today: digital storytelling. Central to this reassessment is the emergence of metamodernism as our dominant cultural condition.

This volume argues that metamodernism has brought with it a new kind of creative modality in which the divide between the digital and non-digital is no longer binary and oppositional. Jordan explores the emerging poetics of this inherently transmedial and hybridic postdigital condition through a detailed analysis of hypertextual, locative mobile and collaborative storytelling. With a focus on twenty-first century storytelling, including print-based and nondigital art forms, the book ultimately widens our understanding of the modes and forms of metamodernist creativity.

Postdigital Storytelling is of value to anyone engaged in creative writing within the arts and humanities. This includes scholars, students and practitioners of both physical and digital texts as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary practice-based research in which storytelling remains a primary approach.

(Source: Routledge catalog copy)

SKAM (a Norwegian word meaning “shame”) is a Norwegian television show for teens, written and directed by Julie Andem for NRK, and had its fourth and final season in spring 2017. Each season, the show followed a different teen in an Oslo high school, and it has dealt with topics such as sexual harassment, mental illness, same-sex-relationships, drug use and Islamophobia.

This presentation analyses how the popular Norwegian show SKAM used social media as its main narrative platform. The paper uses narratology as well as contemporary theories of distributed narrative (Walker, 2005) and transmedia narrative (Dena, 2009; Ryan, 2013) to analyse how SKAM develops storylines across multiple media. It will compare this to works of electronic literature that have pioneered similar techniques, and relate the intense engagement of fans on the official site and independent sites to fan fiction studies and to net prov. 

A key feature of SKAM is that it is published online first. Traditional Friday-night broadcast episodes are compilations of video clips published almost daily on http://skam.p3.no, where fans also screenshots of text conversations and occasional Instagram photos. In addition, many of the characters have Instagram accounts where content is often released without being featured on the official website. SKAM has become popular well beyond its target audience of Norwegian 16-19 girls, with a large international fan base providing translations and extensive discussions and analyses on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

Andreas Zingerle, from the University of Linz, visited Digital Culture at the University of Bergen on an Erasmus teacher exchange in week 8 of 2015. Zingerle presented his research on February 16 and also gave a workshop on February 18.

Zingerle writes:

My work focuses on human computer and computer mediated human-human interaction with a special interest in transmedia and interactive storytelling. Since 2010 I collaborate with Linda Kronman as the artist group 'kairus.org'. We have worked with the thematic of internet fraud and online scams, constantly shifting our focus and therefore approaching the theme from a number of perspectives like: data security, ethics of vigilante communities, narratives of scam e-mails, scam & technologies. Research subjects are online scammers, vigilante communities of scambaiters and their use of storytelling and technology.

The practice based research is closely intertwined with the artistic production. We adopt methodologies, used by anthropologists and sociologist, therefore our artworks are often informed by archival research (scambaiter forums, archives of fake websites and scam e-mail correspondence), content analysis (narratives of correspondences between scambaiters and scammers), participation observations (self exploration of scambaiting tactics, ‘419 fiction’ workshops) and field research (artist in residence program in Ghana). Besides the artworks we publish academic research papers related to our projects and through workshops we contextualize our quite focused research topics of the artworks to wider discourses like data privacy, activism and hacking culture, ethics of vigilante online communities and disruptive art practices. In our workshops we also explore how scambaiting skills and tools can be used more generally in media competence trainings or in production of disruptive digital fiction.

(Source: UiB)

In this interview Michael J. Maguire also known as clevercelt writes about his development in the field of electronic literature both as creative writer and academic scholar. He gives some insights into the work of programming, his interest for computer games and the Phd thesis. The interview stands out for the many references to other authors.

My discussion presents a paratext-based model for analysis of transmedia projects that I offer in
the chapter “Thresholds of Transmedia Storytelling: Applying Gérard Genette’s Paratextual Theory to The 39 Clues Series for Young Readers,” in the upcoming book Examining Paratextual Theory and Its Applications in Digital Culture. This chapter builds on Genette’s analysis in order to offer a model for examining how various paratexts mediate the reader’s interaction with the storyworld of a transmedia narrative. This presentation, in turn, focuses on the framework presented in the chapter, but with an eye toward how the chapter’s revised paratextual model enables examination and negotiation of the tension between the passive reader that Genette posits and the active reader a transmedia project requires. On the one hand, the paratexts of a transmedia project offer the reader a myriad of thresholds into a story, requiring interactive and sophisticated interpretive practices in order to build a “big picture” understanding of the narrative world. On the other hand, these expansive and varied paratexts also, to some degree, foreclose on the reader’s interpretive freedom by filling in gaps that might be left up to the reader’s imagination with a “correct” version of events or ideas, which brings us back to Genette’s construction of the paratext’s essential function as authoritatively guiding the reader’s interpretations. How, then, do paratexts of a transmedia project both demand and limit imaginative participatory reading through emphasizing and subverting an officially sanctioned version of the narrative? In this presentation, I combine paratextual analysis of a transmedia project with Wolfgang Iser’s theory of interaction between text and reader in order to begin to examine how transmedia storytelling constructs readers and reading practices, drawing on Scholastic, Inc.’s The 39 Clues in order to offer specific illustrations.

(Source: Author's Abstract)