Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

13 Game of Thrones

295 13 Game of Thrones Transmedial Worlds, Fandom, and Social Gaming lisbeth klastrup and susana tosca In recent years, we have seen a growing body of scholarship on transmediality from different perspectives: storytelling, world building, industry practices, and studies that look at both “old” media formats, such as film and television and “new” media formats such as websites, digital games, and mobile phones (see, e.g., Dena; Bechmann Pedersen; Evans). This development indicates that the study of cross- or transmediality might slowly be maturing into a field of study in its own right. However, research into transmedial structures and products is constantly challenged by the fact that new digital communication formats and practices continue to emerge, providing new opportunities for transmedial content production . These new formats and new production modes force us to revise how we analytically approach transmedial works. This revision includes considering the many ways fans can now be involved with a transmedial world, not the least through social media, an area of user-involvement that has so far not been examined in this context. In this chapter, we revisit our previous work on transmedial worlds (tmw) by looking at a recent example of a transmedial world campaign that included the use of social media and micro-gaming and involved fans in a variety of ways. The marketing agency Campfire developed a campaign during the spring of 2011 to create awareness and hype around the American channel hbo’s launch of the new tv series Game of Thrones (got), which is based on the fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire written by George R. R. Martin. The books, set in a medievalstyle universe, are extremely popular beyond the genre niche and have generated a dedicated fan following despite the long time gaps between one novel and the next. The first season of the tv series is based on the first of the books, A Game of Thrones, and its first ten episodes aired from 296 Klastrup and Tosca April to June 2011. The fan community of the tmw was very active during preproduction of the series, with countless websites, forums, and social network activity related to casting, shooting, and other production topics. The campaign itself sought to reach out to both existing fans of the books and to a potential new audience of tv viewers mainly through an episodic puzzle game called The Maester’s Path, which included both online and off-line components and ran from February 2011 to April 2011. The campaign is interesting as a case because it included elements from both the known book and the still-unknown tv series and because it encouraged its users to spread the word about the game through Facebook, Twitter, and GetGlue. It therefore included a complex interweaving of world actualizations and the integration of social media as a means to create world awareness. While it is obvious to approach a campaign such as this one from an industry practice perspective (which Dena argues should be an integral part of the way we approach transmedial products in general), we want here to combine perspectives on practice and theory. That is, we want to discuss how the game practices and the fan reception we can observe in relation to the got campaign can inform and perhaps change the theory of transmedial worlds that we have previously introduced with a main interest in online game world use.1 Our focus has always been on worlds as abstract content systems and not as particular instantiations, or products . This approach is more appropriate for large, unified, and detailed worlds (such as The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones) rather than for more loosely defined creations that grow overtime (such as Doctor Who or the Ramasjang Danish tv universe). Transmedial World Theory Here we build upon our previous work on transmedial worlds, where we introduced our theoretical framework and applied it to the analysis of various cyberworlds and online computer games. The first paper focused on the design and success criteria of online tmws, and the second and third addressed reception processes, dissecting the aesthetic experience of fan players. Transmedial worlds are abstract content systems from which a repertoire of fictional stories can be actualized or derived across a variety of media forms (see Klastrup and Tosca, “Transmedial Worlds” 409). That Game of Thrones 297 is, tmws are mental constructs shared by both the designers/creators...