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Contemporary media culture is shaped by technological innovations and the gradual move of media conglomerates from vertical to horizontal integration. Among other things, this has led to the increased visibility of transmedial constellations that transgress the borders of both single works and conventionally distinct media, ranging from novel-based franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, or Harry Potter, via comics-based franchises such as Batman, X- Men, or The Walking Dead and film-based franchises such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or The Matrix, to television-based franchises such as Doctor Who, Star Trek, or Lost and video game-based franchises such as Tomb Raider, Warcraft, or Halo. While there are other aspects worth considering, these transmedial entertainment franchises tend to be most visibly defined by their representational functions. In light of the largely uncontested saliency of the representation of characters, stories, and worlds across media such as novels, comics, films, television series, and video games, however, media studies still tends to operate with a surprisingly vague account of transmedial entertainment franchises' "converging contents."
Among the existing approaches to the analysis of the latter, Henry Jenkins's concept of "transmedia storytelling" has proven particularly influential. In his essay "Game Design as Narrative Architecture," for example, Jenkins describes the location of video games within transmedial entertainment franchises such as Star Wars as follows: "One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each a relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels" (2004: 124). In several subsequent publications he revisited and elaborated the concept but left its core parameters largely intact (see, e.g., Jenkins 2006: 93-130; Jenkins 2007; Jenkins 2011). Particularly because he emphasizes that "narrative analysis need not be prescriptive" (2004: 119), though, it seems striking that Jenkins remained primarily concerned with a decidedly "ideal form of transmedia storytelling" (2006: 95).
More specifically, Jenkins's emphasis on the model of "co-creation" as opposed to the "current licensing system" leads him to dismiss a large part of existing forms of transmedial entertainment franchises as "redundant . . . , watered...