WTF is transmedia? 2022 Edition

Long, long ago, when this blog and the earth were both new, one of the primary activities of any gathering of transmedia-adjacent people was coming up with new definitions of "transmedia." This was back when you could come across such people at conferences and in various online groups, which communities have slowly gone quiet over time, though of course new ones have popped up in their place.

…With all new keywords. Because "transmedia" isn't the right one anymore, at least not for me and the alternate reality game scene where I cut my teeth. So let's talk nomenclature, yet again.

On the surface, this debate could always be read as lot of hot air and pedantry, but they had a very serious purpose. All of us were trying to find our affinity groups, other creators working in the same space as us. And we were looking out for our eligibility for funding, awards and professional associations; using the right keywords could mean access to bigger, better opportunities. Being definitionally excluded would mean being locked out of the same.

Transmedia was the hot word of the day, so we who originated in the ARG community went to the mat to be included in it, and included in its rising tide. This, we thought, could be the umbrella term we needed to legitimize our work in the eyes of the entertainment industry.

The consensus definition eventually settled at transmedia storytelling being:

1) Multiple media

2) Each making a unique contribution

2) To a single narrative

It seemed like a broad enough umbrella to shelter both spiderweb and sequential narratives, as I called them; both the MCU and its intricately woven narratives, and other, more ephemeral stories embedded in the real world or online.

But it was always a bit uneasy, because there is a fundamental tension at the heart of it: a corporate conglomerate's franchise universe and scrappy real-world puzzle hunts are wholly different beasts with different audiences and best practices. The same tools and paradigms for one don't extend to the other in terms of business models, funding sources, and skills needed to implement them successfully.

And there were all sorts of weird outliers, anyway, things that felt relevant to my work, anyway, but probably weren't technically transmedia by that definition. Or conversely, things that technically were transmedia but didn't have much in common with… well, with anything I was doing.

If a story is told over multiple Twitter accounts, does that count as "multiple media"? That certainly felt more like stuff-I-make than the Star Wars Universe ever did. What about a documentary with supplementary photos on a website? Or what about an escape room? What about a novel that continues a story begun in a series of previously published short stories? Is it different if the characters have email addresses and write you back? What if there's a staged play? What if that's participatory theater?

It's a great, simple definition, but it never was a perfect fit. The mismatch had some real-world consequences, too, in the end. If someone wants to start laying down the framework for the next massive narrative universe, my particular hard-won skills from the ARG mines aren't the most important ones to have, even if I did write a book with "transmedia" right there in the title.

And that's why we kept talking about it. Why I'm still over here talking about it.

Other Rejected Names

At this point we could ask, why not just stick with the plain old "alternate reality game"? That was never really big enough to describe the spaces we were working in, linguistically speaking. —Now don't get me wrong. I love me an ARG. I wish I could make more of them all the time. It's arguably my very favorite storytelling format! (Despite the deep and inherent ethical dilemmas that come along with it these days, sigh.)

But it was never quite all-inclusive enough to be the umbrella term that covers "cool stuff on the internet and/or in the real world that sort of feels like the stuff I'm making or want to make." ARG as it is used and understood fundamentally implies a bunch of things that aren't always a part of the kinds of projects I, at least, considered cousins. An ARG is real-time. An ARG is played by a community. An ARG has puzzles. An ARG is interactive. An ARG takes place mostly online.

Lots of ARGs are missing a couple of these, but it felt to me like some of the amazing, creative projects with the vibes I was looking for could easily miss… well, all of them, and still be called by the yet-unknown word looking for. So ARG was out.

We've also tried on a lot of other descriptors over the years, but all of them fell short of the one true term. "Digital," for example, doesn't leave room for theater-based experiences, LARPs, tangible story boxes, or escape rooms. And "digital storytelling" would inevitably include straight-up video games, another massive industry that, just like franchise entertainment, doesn't have a lot of overlap with ARGs.

Another early contender was "interactive." That easily separates out franchise entertainment, definitely! But it does still run into the problem of distinguishing from regular ol' video games, especially because "interactive fiction" is usually taken to mean text adventure-style video games.

Even more troubling is the hard fact that not all ARG players interact. The silent majority participate only as spectators. It's easy to envision projects that create the kinds of feelings/experiences/vibes an ARG does without ever allowing any interaction whatsoever beyond whatever is required to consume the story. And if that's enough, the definition falls down anyway; by that standard, you could call a book interactive because you have to turn the pages.

Finally, over these many years there's been some traction around "experiential," and "experience design." That one falls short because frankly it is too easily diluted to mean anything at all, just as has happened with the word "story." Just watching one movie is inarguably an experience. Participating in a marathon or a protest are experiences. Walking into a store is an experience! And often a highly designed experience, as well. So that wasn't a great fit, really, though I tried hard to run with it for a while, since it seemed like the closest thing we'd yet come across.

Ugh, why is it so hard to find a concrete description for "cool story stuff that seems sort of like the stuff I make but is also sometimes very different in other ways."

A New Player Has Entered the Game

And now we arrive at today. The new hotness in town the last few years is "immersive," and I think, I think, I truly believe that we finally have the word we were looking for the whole time.

Immerse is a word with a meaning: to completely engulf in something. Immersive storytelling, therefore, engulfs you in the story.

Years ago, Sean Stacey coined the phrase "This Is Not A Game" to describe the kayfabe of an ARG. The story always behaves as if it thinks it's real. "This Is Not A Story" is a little unwieldy to keep, but that shows that even from the beginning, we had a sort of feeling about what was important about these things we were making and playing. One of our most notable companies was called "Fourth Wall," for crying out loud.

An ARGm an escape room, a VR app, a phone- or Zoom-based theater performance, a story told in wiki edits or emails and texts. A website found from a poster in a movie. A collection of postcards and photos that tell you a mystery story. All of these take fragments of a story world and drag them through the fourth wall. This was the commonality all along. This was what I was looking for: stories that, in the telling, become real.

It doesn't feel too big or too small. It doesn't feel uncomfortable, like we're wedging dissimilar things together; finally, finally, we have terminology that fits.

It's about time.