Fantastic Transmedia

Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds

C. Harvey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349455003, 9781137306036
• eBook ISBN: 9781137306043
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary culture is packed with fantasy and science fiction storyworlds extending across multiple media platforms. This book explores the myriad ways in which imaginary worlds use media like films, novels, videogames, comic books, toys and increasingly user-generated content to captivate and energise contemporary audiences.

1

Fantastic Transmedia

I’m standing in a cinema foyer waiting excitedly to be allowed entry. I’m here with two of my oldest friends, both male, whom I’ve known since I was a kid. We’re surrounded by similar thirtysomething males, a few women and huge hoardings depicting characters from the film we’re about to watch. This is the British Film Institute’s IMAX Cinema, located in the South Bank district of London. We’re here to see Tron: Legacy, the sequel to a film that meant a lot to us in our youth, Disney’s 1982 movie Tron, about a character who is sucked into a computer game world.

We watch the new film, enjoying the Daft Punk soundtrack and seeing Jeff Bridges playing against a computer-manipulated evil version of himself. We’re more sceptical about the use of 3D, the updating of the visuals and, most importantly, the plot. But still, it’s a continuation of the franchise, something that recounts, replays and extends the existing mythology, so we’re happy. Furthermore, because of my interest in transmediality generally and transmedia storytelling specifically, I’m pleased I can engage in the associated media, including the Tron: Evolution videogame and the Tron: Betrayal comic series. Admittedly, in common with other fans, I have a niggle that the comic series doesn’t quite tie into the rest of the franchise in an entirely consistent way, especially given that it’s meant to because this is transmedia storytelling, and it’s supposed to be integrated in a way that tie-in media never used to be.¹ At the time of writing I haven’t yet seen the Tron: Uprising animated television show in its totality, but I have bought a Tron: Legacy action figure (it lights up).

But wait a moment. In actual fact, Tron: Legacy isn’t the first sequel to the original movie after all. In 2003, Monolith Productions developed a game called Tron 2.0, which Disney’s own publishing arm, Buena Vista Interactive, subsequently released. If anything, the game owed much more visual fidelity to the 1982 film than the 2010 film and its associated transmedia elements, going to some considerable effort to recreate its distinctive aesthetic. Tron 2.0 was similarly launched alongside a comic series, this time entitled Tron: Ghost in the Machine, and a toy range. Yet the advent of Tron: Legacy, the accompanying game, comic, toy range and television show removed Tron 2.0 and its contribution from the franchise’s canon (tron.wikia.com 2014a). Fittingly for a franchise about fantasy computer environments, Tron 2.0 was effectively wiped from memory.

Are both of these examples of transmedia storytelling? In the case of Tron: Legacy and its associated media, this is perhaps an easy question to answer. Tron: Legacy was very much constructed as an example of transmedia storytelling by the franchise’s various overseers and creators, that is to say a systematic, integrated attempt at telling stories located in the same storyworld across different kinds of media (Hedges in McCabe 2010:52). Different, in other words, from the kind of licensed – but presumably somehow ad hoc – expansion of storyworlds undertaken by tie-in media previously, which remains a prominent and active form of storytelling. That is to say, presumably different from the Tron 2.0 game, comic and toy range it displaced, even though Tron: Legacy’s tie-in comic Tron: Betrayal isn’t quite as integrated as might have been intended.

Understanding whether these differences in terms of development, production and distribution are substantial enough to differentiate one form of crossmedia production from another is key to defining transmedia storytelling, to determining where it comes from, what it looks like now and where it might be headed. Licensed tie-in production may indeed be a phenomenon so fundamentally distinct from the integrated, systematic development and distribution which characterises other contemporary forms of crossmedia production that the two should not be considered as related activities at all, as some commentators argue (Dinehart 2011; Jenkins 2011). Alternatively, it may be the case that crossmedia storytelling has always taken multiple forms, utilising many different creative paths, and will continue to do so. But before I can give anything approaching a definitive answer, we first need to take a journey.

A fantastic voyage

It goes without saying that Tron isn’t the only prominent example of fantastic transmedia storytelling. From The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Doctor Who to Star Trek, fantasy and science fiction have dominated the wider transmedia landscape for decades. As these mainstream examples suggest, in commercial terms there is clearly an enduring appetite for material we might broadly describe as the ‘fantastic’. Henry Jenkins has argued that the reason might lie with the fandoms these genres attract: transmedia storytelling appealing to those individuals who enjoy searching out disparate narrative elements across multiple media platforms (2008:20–21). This may well be the case, but there might also be something in the generic characteristics of science fiction and fantasy that renders them ideally suited to varieties of crossmedial expansion.

The structuralist theorist Tzvetan Todorov offers up a highly focused understanding of the ‘fantastic’: one that is characterised by ‘hesitation’ on the part of characters and readers as to the nature of events, sufficient to make them question reality (1975:33). John Clute and John Grant note that prior to Todorov’s definition, ‘fantastic’ was used as a critical term in the 1930s and 1940s to describe both science fiction and fantasy, noting that Todorov narrows the term to differentiate it from ‘the uncanny’, in which unusual events in a story are attributed to natural causes, and ‘the marvellous’, in which unusual events are awarded a supernatural explanation (1997:335). Clute and Grant also observe that because they share the same root, ‘fantasy’ might be regarded as the adjectival form of the ‘fantastic’ (ibid).

While observing the multiplicity of ways in which the term can be used as an alternative to ‘realist’ fiction, Clute and Grant advance what they term ‘a working definition’ of fantasy, describing ‘A fantasy text’ as a ‘self-coherent narrative’ (Clute and Grant 1997:337–338). They suggest that fantasy works set in the real world must necessarily depict narrative elements which are impossible as we perceive the real world; and that fantasy works set in invented worlds must be impossible, though the narrative elements they include might be possible according to the rules of the invented world (ibid).

For Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, fantasy can be distinguished from science fiction on the basis that fantasy deals with the ‘impossible and the unexplainable’, whereas science fiction ‘regards everything as explicable’ (2009:3). Yet within a media franchise – especially episodic ones telling very different stories, perhaps on a week by week basis – the distinctions between the two are not always clear-cut. Doctor Who, for instance, contains suitable mutability within its diegesis to be described as ‘science fiction’ but also ‘science fantasy’, while also playing with genres such as horror, comedy and thriller (Miles and Wood 2004:129, 131, 133). Other franchises like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek and Farscape likewise play with tropes from other genres such as the musical, the Western and Chuck Jones/Loony Tunes cartoons, respectively, though framing them in a dominant context of fantasy or science fiction in each case.

Brian Attebery draws on the idea of the ‘fuzzy set’, originally found in the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, to help describe the genre of fantasy (1992:12–13). Attebery describes how fuzzy set theory suggests that, while prototypical examples might exist in the middle of any particular category, at the boundaries of the set are those elements whose distinguishing features are rendered fuzzy, ‘determined not by boundaries but by a center’ (Attebery 1992:12). Mendlesohn extends Attebery’s usage of this approach further still, to argue that fantasy should not be regarded as a single fuzzy set but multiple fuzzy sets (Mendlesohn 2008:xvii).

Attebery notes that fantasy and science fiction have evolved alongside each other, and that many writers have contributed to both genres, citing Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain as historical examples, and Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe and Patricia McKillip as contemporary exponents of both fantasy and science fiction (1992:105). As Attebery explains, the two genres boast a shared lineage in the stories of Greek myth, in ‘tales of golems and other artificial beings, changeling legends, utopias, dream visions, and allegories’ (ibid). The separation occurs with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first science fiction novel, with the author exchanging fantasy elements for the work of science, electricity substituting for divine fire and so on (ibid).

Darko Suvin’s framing of literary science fiction as ‘the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ remains a pervasive definition of this particular genre (1979:7–8). However, Brooks Landon, in common with other science fiction theorists, chooses to attenuate the term for his own use on the basis that it excludes much ‘genre SF’ (2002:185). The affective approach I argue for in this volume militates against delineating an emotional state as somehow separate from the mental condition which produced it, that is to say the suggestion that estrangement is somehow a product of mental processing alone. However, estrangement can be understood as an embodied, affective response to a narrative or aspect of a narrative. We might view Todorov’s definition of the broader category of the fantastic in a comparable fashion, understanding the hesitancy that the fantastic elicits as an affective engagement that feeds into future engagement with the cultural artefact in question.²

The fluidity of the fantastic and its constituent genres of fantasy and science fiction identified by a number of theorists offers some early indications as to why the fantastic has proven such fertile territory for transmedia articulation. Understanding the affective interrelationship between the audience and these mutable genres as expressed through the transmedia realm will prove crucial to understanding the appeal of fantastic transmedia. Before that, though, we need to understand what transmedia storytelling is now, what it could have been in the past, and what it might become in the future.

A plethora of definitions

Just as there are multiple definitions of what might constitute the fantastic, and in turn multiple definitions of what constitutes fantasy and what constitutes science fiction, there is also enduring contention over what constitutes transmedia storytelling. Indeed, the competing perspectives have proliferated in much the same way as potential examples of the phenomenon have also thrived. For some commentators, it’s a new phenomenon: one that’s particular to the digital age, its creation and dissemination rendered possible by the Internet, mobile technologies and social media. For other commentators, it’s the continuation of an existing mode of storytelling: the logical extension of the licensed media that’s long been derived from other media forms, such as comic books, videogames and novels.

Such definitional arguments seem eerily reminiscent of the debates which characterised videogame studies in the early years of the twentieth-first century. This was the point at which the Academy started to take an active and sustained interest in the culturally and commercially highly significant arena of videogames, extending the critical debate beyond familiar violence-effects arguments to encompass discussions of gender, narrative and the experiential nature of games, and reinvigorating a largely neglected academic history of play theory located in the work of scholars such as Huizinga and Roger Caillois. Indeed, in many ways the critical debates around transmedia storytelling can be understood as an extension of the conversation around videogames, and not purely because videogames are often one of the constituent elements of transmedia projects. Rather it’s because transmedia storytelling, like videogames, is playful, participatory and a new phenomenon, or at the very least, a different articulation of a pre-existing phenomenon.

The definitional argument in terms of games went to the very heart of the embryonic discipline. For instance, technically speaking the word ‘video’ in ‘videogame’ implies the use of a cathode ray tube, which in many contemporary instances is no longer necessary or desirable, such as when players utilise a console with a flat-screen television or play via a mobile device (Wolf 2001:16). The term ‘computer game’ was equally loaded, and even the substitute ‘digital games’ could be used to describe a conventional game of chess. At the time of writing, this particular debate has largely subsided, with most scholars agreeing on the term ‘videogame’ as universally applicable shorthand, but it took some time to reach this point of settlement.

My early experience of transmedia storytelling, as it’s constructed by the Academy, is that this area of study shares some of the same definitional challenges originally encountered by videogame studies: the ‘semantic chaos’ that Scolari identifies as characteristic of ‘digital communication conversations’ more broadly (2008:587). When I was starting my early research into transmedia storytelling (which itself built on my PhD exploring the interrelationship of storytelling and playing in videogame media), I attended an academic conference at the University of Bristol in the UK entitled ‘Technologies of Transmediality’ (2011). This conference brought together a disparate group of academics and practitioners with an interest in ideas of transmediality, notably individuals from the spheres of film, theatre and interactive storytelling. Early in the conference, however, it became apparent that the terms ‘transmedia’, the ‘transmedial’ and ‘transmediality’ were being deployed in wildly different ways. At points the word ‘transmedia’ was being used interchangeably with that of ‘multimedia’, while a theatre practitioner talked of a script as being ‘transmedial’, i.e. extraneous (though vital) to the world created on stage.

It wasn’t that these terms were being applied incorrectly, rather that the terms themselves are liable to multiple interpretations and consequently liable to being subjectively framed by the individual or group using them. Though its meaning might seem deceptively obvious, the same is true of ‘storytelling’. If we therefore connect ‘transmedia’ to ‘storytelling’, it’s not surprising that disagreements arise, and ratcheting down a definition has characterised the study and discussion of ‘transmedia storytelling’ since the term arose. Transmedia writer and games designer Andrea Phillips, like Scolari and many others, identifies the difficulties inherent in trying to pin down what exactly transmedia storytelling might be (2012:13).

This is perhaps not surprising, given that Henry Jenkins, the originator of the term ‘transmedia storytelling’, intended it to be a placeholder description (2013). This ambiguity means the term has been used to describe micro-budget projects emerging from the ‘independent’ sector which utilise social media, the Internet and mobile technologies, as well as high-profile, big-budget, franchise-based undertakings which can utilise feature films, books, television programmes and console games. Jenkins himself has indicated an enthusiasm for moving beyond definitions of transmedia storytelling to a discussion of the particularities of the form (ibid). An alternative viewpoint might be that because transmedia storytelling has become a dominant piece of terminology in a variety of commercial, cultural and academic contexts, that we must instead work towards a series of additional, categorical subset definitions to describe a variety of crossmedial, narrative-inflected practices, all of which can logically co-exist beneath the broad banner of transmedia storytelling. Again, a number of theorists have started doing this (Dena 2009; 2010; Mittell 2012–13; 2014; Phillips 2012; Scolari 2009).

What follows, then, is an attempt to assist this process by adumbrating the relatively brief history of the term, identifying older precedents as well as immediate antecedents, and outlining the various perspectives of individuals and groups located chiefly in the industrial sphere and within academia. My intention is to reach a point of synthesis, whereby the varying perspectives are able to work in concert with one another as far as possible. To achieve this synthesis, I’m going to propose other ways of thinking about transmedia storytelling, both in terms of creators and audiences (understanding that they are sometimes one and the same, or that there is at least some crossover), that gives primacy to the relational aspects involved in telling stories across multiple forms of media. This relationality, as I will explain, is founded in an approach which is both theoretically situated in cultural memory and emerges from a wide-ranging observation of different kinds of crossmedia narrative production.

Transmediality and intertextuality

First published in 1997, Janet Murray’s seminal book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, explores the potential varieties of storytelling that might arise in the coming digital landscape. Murray talks about the ways in which the ‘chameleonic’ power of the computer mean it can alternately be constructed as a ‘theatre, a town hall, an unravelling book, an animated wonderland, a sports arena, and even a potential life form’ (1999:284). She offers up myriad varieties of interactive fiction, from the branching, ‘choose-your-own’ adventure type to extraordinary rhizomic structures offering up interconnecting nodes of narrative (1999:78, 126–153).

Some of these approaches to conceiving interactive fiction remain the province of literary or artistic innovators, while one in particular – videogames – can be understood as a truly populist variety of interactive fiction. In addition, Murray anticipates a number of developments which resonate with my conception of the contemporary transmedia landscape:

The compelling spatial reality of the computer will also lead to virtual environments that are extensions of the fictional world … An on-line, serially updated virtual environment would open up a broadcast story in the same way a film expands a story told in a stage play, by providing additional locations for dramatic action or wider coverage of the characters or events merely referred to in the broadcast series.

Murray (1999:255)

Murray’s description will sound very familiar to anyone who’s been tempted to explore the websites surrounding a favourite television programme or film, since a wide variety of fantasy and non-fantasy fra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Frames of Reference
• 1. Fantastic Transmedia
• 2. Stories and Worlds
• 3. Of Hobbits and Hulks: Adaptation Versus Narrative Expansion
• 4. Canon-Fodder: Halo and Horizontal Remembering
• 5. Configuring Memory in the Buffyverse
• 6. Material Myths and Nostalgia-Play in Star Wars
• 7. Fantastically Independent
• 8. Transmedia Memory
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index