ABSTRACT

Comics and films have offered some genuine opportunities for transmedia storytelling across the mythos, a media swarming that has multiplied the unearthly cosmos originally envisioned by Lovecraft in multiple dimensions, but one reason for exploring the mythos as a truly proliferative, transformative series of creative acts is because of games. Henry Jenkins, one of the first critics explicitly to discuss transmedia storytelling in Convergence Culture in relation to The Matrix, observed that the term could have various meanings as an emergent concept, but offered his own interpretation: Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. Transmedia storytelling should demonstrate a richness of exploration beyond the single instance of one story. While franchises such as Batman and even Resident Evil may seem useful examples of transmedia storytelling, this aversion to risk means that they tend to ignore the more complex examples, doubling down instead on the franchise possibilities of shared intellectual property rights.