Designing a transmedia narrative to be location-agnostic also provides the author and audience with more flexibility than designing it to be location-dependent. Location-dependency can take at least three forms: Requiring the user to participate in a narrative or some of its elements at a specific location (e.g. having a gatheringContinue Reading
Designing a transmedia narrative to be time-agnostic provides both the author and the audience more flexibility than making it time-dependent. Time-dependency can take at least three forms: Requiring the user to participate in a narrative or some of its elements at a specific time (e.g. scheduling an online or realContinue Reading
The interactions and in-game events in well-designed ARG mimic real life and don’t announce themselves as elements in a game (Szulborski, 2005, p. 13). The virtual world is not modeled through a symbolic interface. Rather, the interactions in an alternate reality game can take many forms and are generally designedContinue Reading
Designers will need to deal with a broad range of issues when addressing the deceptively simple question of whether the transmedia narrative focuses on individual versus shared participation. At one time, individual participation with a medium meant taking one’s book and retiring to a favorite spot, while shared participation involvedContinue Reading
Where the character archetypes provide a framework that begins to describe who the characters are and what that drives them, the character roles describe the relationships between the characters. Character roles fall into three categories (Card, 1988, p. 59): Walk-on and placeholder characters: The walk-on and placeholder characters exist in theContinue Reading
A plot is a cause-and-effect chain of relationships that unify the actions, behaviors, and events in a story. McKee describes plot as the “writer’s choice of events and their design in time” (McKee, 1997, p. 43). He adds that plot provides an “internally consistent, interrelated pattern of events that move throughContinue Reading
Story Mode The story mode refers to how the story relates to the audience during its presentation. There are two story modes: Representational: In representational mode everything is expressed from the point of view of a character in the story and the author never addresses the audience. The story isContinue Reading
One of the biggest challenges of transmedia narratives is developing a story structure that fits a linear narrative into a non-linear transmedia framework. Fragmenting a story across multiple platforms won’t work for most members of the audience (Norrington, 2010). When designing the structure of transmedia narratives, it is important to maintainContinue Reading
One of the biggest challenges of transmedia narratives is developing a story structure that fits a linear narrative into a non-linear transmedia framework. Fragmenting a story across multiple platforms won’t work for most members of the audience (Norrington, 2010). When designing the structure of transmedia narratives, it is important to maintainContinue Reading
At the story level, the transmedia author focuses on individual stories rather than the broader storyworld or transmedia project as a whole. At the beginning of the story development process, it is important to identify the story concept, dramatic question, and controlling idea. Story Concept Story emerges from the interrelationshipsContinue Reading