Skip to main content

Bibliography: " Transmedia Storytelling" (2003) by Henry Jenkins


Jenkins, Henry. "Transmedia Storytelling." MIT Technology Reviews, January 15, 2003. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/.

In this article, Jenkins introduces what he terms as “transmedia storytelling” within the game industry and design, that situates the growing connection between different media channels in creating an overarching narrative that transcends the initial boundaries of a specific platform. He states that there is a creation of new narratives, expanding on the current, exploring on the unknown, and even testing the pre-established or possibly contesting against it. In discussing this further, Jenkins lists current limitations and difficulties in transmedia entertainment, specifically, the lack of the media industry to do collaborative productions that compel transmedia experience – that is, there is a need of a new model for co-creation, rather than adaptation-of content that crosses media.

In response, Jenkins proposes transmedia storytelling, wherein in its ideal form, each medium does what it does best-so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced gameplay, with each franchise entry needing to be self-contained enough in order to enable autonomous consumption. This, he would argue, sustains the depth of experience and motivates further consumption. He uses the examples of Pokémon, Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones as examples of how transmedia storytelling spans out through different mediums but ultimately leads back to the development of each franchise’s known universe, thus allowing new content consumption for the audience, and giving the franchise a fresh new appeal with each addition.

This article is what catapulted Jenkins in the transmedia studies field and cited by other scholars, thus giving a glimpse of the origin and development of focus of transmedia studies over the years, evolving beyond the cinema industry and engaging with new technologies and accessibility for audiences.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bibliography: " Game Design as Narrative Architecture" (2004) by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game , edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–30. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. In this article, Jenkins examines games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility. He list downs the characteristics of games as defined by current Ludology versus Narratology debates such as: (1) not all games tell stories but they do have narrative aspirations, follows genre entertainment and previous narrative experiences; (2) narrative analysis need not be prescriptive; (3) games should not be reduced to the experience of a story; and (4) if games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories for games as a medium, specifically, is what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. He also lists down the problems and limitations within the current game study discourses, often pointing out how ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis + Critical Response Paper: " The Imaginary" (2006) Chapter 1 part 1 by Claudia Strauss

Reevaluating Scholarships (October 17, 2019) In Claudia Strauss’s article “The Imaginary” (2006), she gives a detailed discussion and analysis of the major scholarships in cultural studies regarding the matter of the Imaginaries, such as the works of Castoriadis, Lacan, Anderson, and Taylor, in order to map out the essential arguments that are more popularly being used/cited in cultural studies research, before she examines how Ivy uses these concepts with regard to the national-imaginaries with the Japanese socio-cultural sphere. In summary, Strauss explains that Castoriadis was concerned with "concepts of cultural abstraction, reification and homogenization, while Lacan used the concept of the imaginary to explain fantasies, and Anderson and Taylor used the concept for explaining cultural models as potentially valuable when used with person-centered ethnographic methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects” (323). Despite the summation of the the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis: "The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo" (1998) by Inoue Shun

In Inoue Shun’s “The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo” (1998), Inoue explores the modern invention, and subsequent reinvention, of the Japanese martial arts by an examination of Kodokan judo (163). This is done through a detailed discussion of Kano’s decision and active participation of creating the new martial arts such as: conception, process of modernization through scientification of the martial arts, promotions and competitions, institutionalizations and adoptions into various agencies (government institutions, universities, etc.), establishment of the Kodokan Cultural Association (promotion of the basic principles of Kodokan judo as well as serving as a legitimate infrastructure and governing body that actively promotes the new martial arts ideology), its inevitable re-invention post-Kano years by the Dai Nihon Butokukai (leading to an ultranationalistic role), and finally, a return to the sportification of budo post-WW2 in order to escape censorship wh...
Post a Comment
Read more