ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the interaction between users and transmedial worlds from the individual user’s perspective. It develops a theory of transmedial experience inspired by McCarthy and Wright’s (2007) model of experiences of technology, which is used as an organizational heuristics to examine four threads of experience (compositional, sensual, emotional and spatio-temporal) and their six corresponding sense-making operations (anticipating, connecting, interpreting, reflecting, appropriating and recounting). The chapter integrates this phenomenological approach with literary theories about the interaction between user and text, and considers how the so-called affordances of different media platforms shape our experiences of a transmedial world. The final part of the chapter presents an extensive case study of the experiential reception and appropriation of Otome transmedial worlds by their audiences.