Problem This Solves
Contemporary media creation has outgrown the "one text, one world, one story" formula inherited from textualist literary theory (New Criticism through Deconstruction). Content now fragments across platforms, screens, and devices while simultaneously aggregating into serialized franchises. Practitioners and analysts who treat individual narratives as the primary unit of analysis miss what actually organizes these ecosystems: the world. Without a world-centered framework, transmedia projects devolve into "media stacking" -- distributing the same story redundantly across channels -- rather than building environments rich enough to sustain many stories, many contributors, and many entry points.
The volume edited by Marta Boni (2017) addresses this by repositioning "worlds -- as imaginary territories and perennial, collectively built, semiotic realms" as the essential unit of analysis. Marie-Laure Ryan's taxonomy of proliferation and Paolo Bertetti's possible-worlds apparatus then supply the formal tools for distinguishing what kinds of expansion a world actually performs.
Key Principle
Worlds have displaced stories as the primary unit of media creation. As Jenkins wrote: "More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium. The world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise" (Jenkins 2006, 116). The practical consequence is threefold:
- Text, world, and story are separable layers. A single world can host many stories (narrative proliferation); a single story can traverse many worlds (ontological proliferation); many texts across media can converge on one world (textual/medial proliferation).
- Worlds are collectively built. They emerge from "networks of speculations, interpretations, and social uses" -- official creators, fan communities, paratextual objects, and industrial actors all contribute.
- Worlds behave as living machines, not artificial machines. Drawing on Von Neumann via Morin, top-down designed transmedia ("artificial machines") degrade from first operation, while worlds sustained by fan-driven regeneration ("living machines") self-repair and evolve over decades.
Good Examples
- Cloud Atlas (Mitchell 2004): Six stories spanning different centuries and continents that are ontologically part of the same world -- connected by theme ("everything is connected"), a recurring birthmark, and a nested structure where each story's text appears as a physical object in the next. This is narrative proliferation: many stories, one world, no ontological relocation required.
- Run, Lola, Run (Tykwer): Three mutually exclusive scenarios branch from a single decision point. Same problem, goal, setting, and characters -- but logically incompatible outcomes. This is ontological proliferation: one story premise, many worlds.
- Doctor Who: A "rickety world" whose survival over 50+ years "happened almost completely by accident," built through fan cultures despite friction between grassroots and industrial processes. Exemplifies the living-machine model -- unreliable components enabling constant self-regeneration.
Bad Examples
- Media stacking as transmedia: Distributing the same linear story across film, comic, and game without each medium contributing something unique. Biblical narratives across stained glass, frescoes, and paintings already did this centuries ago -- it is not what makes contemporary transmedia distinctive.
- Treating transmedia peripherals as essential: The Matrix franchise planned comics, anime, and games as integral, but most fans were unaware of peripherals beyond the computer games. Brian Clark observed in 2012 that "there's never been a big 'transmedia hit'" among projects conceived as transmedia from inception. The Mother Ship must stand alone.
- Story-dominant concepts forced into transmedia: Linear story arcs (jokes, tragedy, suspense-driven plots) have "nothing to gain from fragmentation and dispersion across media." Transmedia potential resides in world-richness, not plot complexity. Forcing a story-dominant property into transmedia yields commercial exploitation, not aesthetic value.
Key Quotes
"Worlds -- as imaginary territories and perennial, collectively built, semiotic realms -- are necessary for the understanding of media creation and for the interpretive processes it stimulates." -- Boni, Introduction
"For a narrative idea to lend itself to transmedia treatment, its appeal should not lie in a linear story, because the temporal arc of stories has nothing to gain from fragmentation and dispersion across media... rather, the narrative idea should reside in its world, because worlds can contain many stories, and they can be described by encyclopedic collections of documents addressing many senses." -- Ryan, Ch. 1
"A world cannot be interpreted as the mere sum of individual media bricks, but instead as a life form, determined by a set of texts and their interpretations, superimposed over the years." -- Boni, Introduction
"Readers imagine fictional worlds as the closest possible to Actual World, and they only make changes that are mandated by the text." -- Ryan (2013), cited in Bertetti, Ch. 2
Rules of Thumb
- Start with the world, not the story. When analyzing or designing a transmedia property, ask "What is the world?" before "What is the plot?" The world is what persists across media; individual stories are trails through it.
- Use Ryan's proliferation taxonomy. Classify any expansion as narrative (many stories, one world), ontological (one story, many worlds), or textual/medial (many texts converging on one world). This prevents lumping all franchise activity under a single label.
- Design for the living machine. Plan for fan-driven regeneration, not just top-down control. Centripetal forces (coherence, unity, design) must coexist with centrifugal forces (fan expansion, unpredictable mutation, semiotic drift).
- Apply the principle of minimal departure. Build only what differs from the actual world; audiences default to real-world assumptions for everything unspecified. Detail should serve textual strategy, not exhaustiveness.
- Assess world-dominance vs. story-dominance. Use Ryan's two-dimensional model (worldness on one axis, plotness/tellability on the other) to evaluate transmedia potential. High worldness is necessary; high plotness is a bonus, not a substitute.
- Treat paratexts as world-building instruments. Maps, credits, guides, merchandise, and fan-made artifacts are extractable elements of the world, not decorative marketing supplements.
Related References
- Transmedia Models: Western Storytelling vs. Japanese Media Mix - How worlds expand across media
- Franchise Management: Battleworlds, Copyright, and Managed Multiplicity - Industrial management of world proliferation
- The Politics of World Building - Political implications of centripetal vs centrifugal