From Transmedia Storytelling to Transmedia Experience: Star Wars Celebration as a Crossover/Hierarchical Space

Abstract

To date, transmedia storytelling has been analyzed formally, in terms of whether it promotes diegetic coherence or expansion, 1 as well as politically, in terms of how it articulates capitalist values. 2 Transmedia has also been theorized via audience productivity 3 and memory. 4 Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that transmedia extensions occur within a proliferating, ubiquitous screen culture, the issue of transmedia’s locatedness in space and place has generally been under-explored. Only the subcategory of transmedia storytelling dubbed “Alternate Reality Games” (ARGs) has tended to merit analysis of extra-diegetic spatiality and how this is utilized within the ARG’s real-world gameplay. 5 Otherwise, transmedia is assumed to float free of spatial constraints, flowing across devices, platforms, and varied screen media.