Felicia Day is not exactly a name that needs introduction on teh internets. Nor is Bioware. In fact, quite a lot of you can probably guess what I’m going to talk about just from these two names. How many of you are saying ‘oh, Dragon Age’ now? Yes? Oh well done.
If you’re not saying anything of the sort, Felicia Day is, of course, among other things the criminal mastermind behind The Guild, which I personally find as delightful as a double barrelful of happy weasels. Bioware are...well, Bioware. They are collaborating to make a 6 part web series called Dragon Age: Redemption (TM). It is an example of transmedia storytelling done on a large scale. And watching the rather dramatic trailer for this made me consider what this actually implies.
So, transmedia storytelling. Transmedia. Storytelling.Transmediastorytelling.
Nope. I still don’t like the term very much. It’s a slightly woolly sort of phrase - one of those catch-all phrases that seems so useful until you’re actually trying to use it to describe a specific thing, whereupon suddenly it isn’t. What it means is: storytelling across multiple platforms. Well, OK. So what’s the difference between this and normal storytelling? All storytelling involves at least one medium of some kind, and this choice of medium impacts on both the construction of the narrative by the storyteller and the reception of the narrative by the listener. I don’t like the term transmedia because it squashes together a lot of rather nuanced concepts.
Media is one of the broadest terms available. A lot of the time it’s used to elide categorically different concepts. Take an example - Pride and Prejudice. I have a copy of this on my Kindle, and another copy on my bookshelf. Does this make it transmedia? No, of course not, the variance in media isn’t incorporated into the book itself but is external to the narrative. A properly transmedia story is one where the story and the shift from platform to platform are interwoven. So hang on - what does that mean? Would that encompass a story that shifts between word and image? static images and moving images? text and audio files? Or are we talking about stories that shift from blog to Twitter, from bespoke website to YouTube video?
This comes down to a basic split in the meaning of the term ‘media’, between a term describing the code in which a story is inscribed, language, words, images, etc, and a term describing the conduit through which this code passes - a screen, a page, a platform. Transmedia habitually denotes both these meanings at once.
So let’s talk about Dragon Age: Redemption(TM), a web TV series in 6-parts set in the Dragon Age universe.
Now the crucial, transmedia-ey part of that sentence is of course the last 6 words. What does it mean to set a story in a particular universe? Well, it means to expand that universe, or more precisely in this particular context, it means to expand the experience of that universe. By moving from one medium to another, moreover, Bioware will expand the Dragon Age universe in more than one way, not just within the fictional boundaries of the established text of all various Dragon Age permutations, but also in terms of the kind of experience this universe provides. Playing a game is quite a different sort of narrative experience from watching TV(web or otherwise) or reading a comic. Consider them as located along a continuum of narrative, one end of which is simulation and the other representation. To play a game requires more work in constructing the narrative from a player, than to receive it passively as a depicted narrative onscreen. By shifting the platform through which the players of Dragon Age can experience that particular fictional universe, Bioware aren’t just shifting media in the straightforward sense of conduit, but also in the sense of code. This isn’t just a shift in how the fiction is presented, but in how it is experienced.
Day’s main web TV project, The Guild, actually provides an interesting juxtaposition of these ideas - rendering a representative narrative account(the plot of series) of a simulatory narrative experience(gaming). I love the Guild on one level just for being downright gloriously entertaining. But it also withstands quite a lot of thought. The thing about simulatory experiences is that the sense of immersion they can create (demonstrated, particularly in series 4, by the depiction of the central characters actually in the world of the game) derives from the work done on the part of the player to link events in a meaningful way. The experience of receiving a narrative where the links are made for you is quite a different sort of experience. The Guild is in fact the narrated experience of players creating their own narrative out of the events that occur to them in a simulated environment - a narrative of emergent narrative in short.
A good narrative game could be said to provide the kind of simulation that lends itself to representation. (This isn’t a criterion for a good game full stop, of course. No one was ever enthralled by someone narrating a game of Tetris*). They don’t just enable players to create their own narratives, they enable players to create narratives they want to share, and that others in their turn find compelling. They create a fictional world that can withstand more than one kind of approach, that lends itself to more than one kind of experience. They have the potential, in short, to be properly transmedia.
Anyway. So. Who’s looking forward to Dragon Age: Redemption then? I totally am.
*Though, having said that, I don’t know. The one thing humans universally do really really well is making stories out of inert lumps of stuff. Anyone know a good story based on Tetris? I am open to being persuaded here.