Transmedia Character Studies provides a range of methodological tools and foundational vocabulary for the analysis of characters across and between various forms of multimodal, interactive, and even non-narrative or non-fictional media. This highly innovative work offers new perspectives on how to interrelate production discourses, media texts, and reception discourses, and how to select a suitable research corpus for the discussion of characters whose serial appearances stretch across years, decades, or even centuries. Each chapter starts from a different notion of how fictional characters can be considered, tracing character theories and models to approach character representations from perspectives developed in various disciplines and fields. This book will enable graduate students and scholars of transmedia studies, film, television, comics studies, video game studies, popular culture studies, fandom studies, narratology, and creative industries to conduct comprehensive, media-conscious analyses of characters across a variety of media.

"Transmedial Character Studies provides a range of methodological tools and foundational vocabulary for the analysis of characters across and between various forms of multimodal, interactive, and even non-narrative or non-fictional media. This highly innovative work offers new perspectives on how to interrelate production discourses, media texts, and reception discourses, and how to select a suitable research corpus for the discussion of characters whose serial appearances stretch across years, decades, or even centuries. Each chapter starts from a different notion of how fictional characters can be considered, tracing character theories and models to approach character representations from perspectives developed in various disciplines and fields. This book will enable graduate students and scholars of transmedia studies, film, television, comics studies, video game studies, popular culture studies, fandom studies, narratology, and creative industries to conduct comprehensive, media-conscious analyses of characters across a variety of media"--

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.

Transmedia storytelling is defined as a process where integral elements of fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels to create a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. This process and its narrative models have had an increasing influence on the academic world in addressing both theoretical and practical dimensions of transmedia storytelling. The Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling and Narrative Strategies is a critical scholarly resource that explores the connections between consumers of media content and information parts that come from multimedia platforms, as well as the concepts of narration and narrative styles. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as augmented reality, digital society, and marketing strategies, this book explores narration as a method of relating to consumers. This book is ideal for advertising professionals, creative directors, academicians, scriptwriters, researchers, and upper-level graduate students seeking current research on narrative marketing strategies.

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television set’s status as the sole domestic access point to audio-visual dramatic content. Viewers can engage with ‘television’ without ever turning a television set on. Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of ‘the television audience’? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry’s development of emerging new media technologies, and what ‘television’ now means for its audiences.

This handbook collects, for the first time, the state of research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in a single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 50 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Fallout and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like transmedia worldbuilding, immersion, transgressive play, or player–character relations. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help fans, students, and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this new interdisciplinary field.

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape—this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture, and historical media industries.

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.

This volume provides engaging accounts with transmedia practices in the long nineteenth century and offers model analyses of Victorian media (e.g., theater, advertising, books, games, newspapers) alongside the technological, economic, and cultural conditions under which they emerged in the Anglophone world. By exploring engagement tactics and forms of audience participation, the book affords insight into the role that social agents – e.g., individual authors, publishing houses, theatre show producers, lithograph companies, toy manufacturers, newspaper syndicates, or advertisers – played in the production, distribution, and consumption of Victorian media. It considers such examples as Sherlock Holmes, Kewpie Dolls, media forms and practices such as cut-outs, popular lectures, telephone conversations or early theater broadcasting, and such authors as Nellie Bly, Mark Twain, and Walter Besant, offering insight into the variety of transmedia practices present in the long nineteenth century. The book brings together methods and theories from comics studies, communication and media studies, English and American studies, narratology and more, and proposes fresh ways to think about transmediality. Though the target audiences are students, teachers, and scholars in the humanities, the book will also resonate with non-academic readers interested in how media contents are produced, disseminated, and consumed, and with what implications.

Transmedia Storytelling explores the theories and describes the use of the imagery and techniques shared by producers, authors and audiences of the entertainment, information and brand communication industries as they create and develop their stories in this new, interactive ecosystem.