One tale, many lives: Inside the worlds of transmedia storytelling

In December, the prestigious film magazine Sight and Sound asked director SS Rajamouli to list the 10 greatest films of all time, according to him. Rajamouli’s list was controversial, completely ignoring art cinema for the unabashedly popular, including films such as the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Kung Fu Panda. He had one Indian film on his list, Kadiri Venkata Reddy’s 1957 Telugu classic Mayabazar.

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Mayabazar is the telling of an episode of the Mahabharata, but it’s not an episode that is found in standard tellings of the epic. It is based on the Sasirekha Parinayam, a folktale popular in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. In it, Sasirekha, the daughter of Balarama, falls in love with Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu. Balarama wants Sasirekha to marry Duryodhana’s son Lakshmana Kumara. Sasirekha and Abhimanyu finally get together, after the intervention of two Cupids, the deity Krishna and Abhimanyu’s cousin, the demon Ghatotkacha.

The story of Sasirekha was popular before the release of Mayabazar. It was re-enacted in Kuchipudi performances, and was a staple of roving shadow-puppet performers and Yakshagana dance theatre groups.

It is a prime example of transmedia storytelling.

The term “transmedia storytelling” was coined by Henry Jenkins, an American media scholar and professor of communication, journalism and cinematic art at the University of Southern California. He first used the term in his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Jenkins defines it as “represent(ing) a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.”

Jenkins points out that transmedia storytelling has been around as long as storytelling itself (see more on this, in the interview alongside). What has changed today is the deliberate deployment of transmedia strategies to build longevity.

One reason for the growing importance of transmedia storytelling, says Rosemary Lokhorst, CEO of Badass Studios, could be that “people’s attention spans have changed and we need to work harder to keep them interested.” Badass Studios creates content at the intersection of virtual reality, gaming, sports and esports. Lokhorst is a tech entrepreneur, videogame writer and author.

Technology has changed people’s attention spans, but it has also created an incredible number of platforms on which to keep audiences engaged. There are podcasts discussing films and TV series; livestreamed gameplay sessions; an explosion of interest in popular culture, with a generation that grew up watching Star Wars and Indiana Jones and reading about Marvel and DC superheroes. Whole extended universes are fleshed out by tie-in novels, games, cartoons, podcasts and comics.

The Matrix is also a game and an animated series. Quentin Tarantino is offering updates on the fictional actors in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, via his podcast. In a recent death notice, he announced that one of the protagonists had died.

Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings and The Last of Us have extended their runtimes, as it were, by teasing out new threads on a range of platforms (games, books, podcasts, spin-off TV series, and more). These new threads unfold over decades.

This extended life of fictional characters isn’t new, of course. Frankenstein and Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond have all experienced incredible longevity as a result of transmedia storytelling. But while the older properties extended their lifetimes more or less organically, these days, the longevity is built in.

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A key aspect of transmedia storytelling, Jenkins says, is the importance of world-making. Each media form brings its own content to the story world; its own characters and locations and lore. Take a walk through Wookieepedia, the online Star Wars encyclopaedia launched in 2005, and you can soon find yourself on the planet Manaan, home to the Glumbrig eel and the amphibious Selkath species; or you can read about Jorus C’baoth, a Jedi Master from the planet Bortras, betrayed by his friend Senator Palpatine.

Looking up Lilith, the main antagonist of the game Diablo IV on Fandom.com (set up in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales), you can find yourself lost in stories about the world of Sanctuary, the overgod Anu and his battle with the goddess Tathamet — stories that add depth and weight to what is essentially a hack-and-slash game.

As storytelling expanded across media, the level of interaction with the audience has grown. As Lokhorst puts it: “The people formerly known as the audience… these people expect more.”

The concept of authorship itself has changed, she adds. “If we look at TV shows, those have been a product of committee storytelling for a longer time. So have games, with large teams responsible for one title. I think that authorship starts with an idea. That can, but does not have to, come from one person. I believe that no one person can be proficient in all types of storytelling, so naturally, more storytellers will become involved in a project when it gets complex. You may need visual art which has an impact on story, or you change the type of screen it is shown on, from page to mobile, which has implications and opportunities. Or you may turn your book into a movie and that is a completely different type of writing, let alone that everyone that touches the script will have input. From director, to actor, to visual effects.”

And then the audience steps in and makes choices, and the story changes again.

Audience-choice driven storytelling can likely be traced back to oral histories performed before crowds. What elements of ancient lore were determined by audience reaction? It’s something we can never know, but if the bawdiness of Shakespeare is any indication, playing to the gallery is centuries if not millennia old.

Even Arthur Conan Doyle gave in to his audience, and resurrected his beloved detective in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905) after initially intending to end the series by throwing him of a cliff at the Reichenbach Falls, in The Final Problem (1893).

More recently, the interactive Netflix film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) offered millions of possible plot changes, based on the combination of choices each viewer made with their remote, leading to five possible endings.

This is a key way in which transmedia storytelling differs from adaptation. The goal of transmedia as he views it, Jenkins says, is to extend authorship to as many others as possible.

This is also where fan fiction comes in. “I think the goal of each franchise is to get big enough and popular enough that people believe in the storyworld and can make their own stories within it,” says Hailey Austin, a lecturer in visual media and culture at Scotland’s Abertay University. “With games especially, but increasingly so with other mediums, fans feel like they have more control over the characters they interact with and if they don’t like something the writers have done, they are vocal and can write their own fan stories of how they wanted something to go. It is a powerful way of engaging with people.”

Austin points out that this involvement “can get tricky”. “By extending ownership, franchises open themselves up to some more toxic sides of fandom,” she says.

Racist Star Wars fans, for instance, were enraged by the major role played by a woman of colour, Kelly Marie Tran, in The Last Jedi (2017). Some of these fans mounted a campaign so hateful and vicious on Instagram that Tran felt compelled to leave the platform.

Extreme opposition like this can shape a story. Gaming studio BioWare, for instance, added a patch to the videogame Mass Effect 3, to offer upset fans a more acceptable ending to the trilogy. Warner Bros eventually released Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021), after fans insisted they wanted to see it (the studio had had a falling out with the filmmaker and switched directors for the official version).

Today’s fans have turned into consumers, insisting that creative works give them what they want.

Marketers are looking at ways they can use this to tell stories better. Christopher Nolan used alternate reality to promote The Dark Knight (2008), with a Why So Serious? marketing campaign that let 11 million users around the world live as citizens in the virtual world of Gotham City.

“These new story types — from immersive to augmented to mixed — bring a lot of new opportunities for brands to reach young audiences who are not looking at printed ads or billboards,” says Lokhorst. “An example of that is what is happening in fashion, where brands launch online collections. Not for you, but for your avatar. I bet Dior had never thought they would create a virtual designer handbag.”

How long, then, until a new story is more an extension of a marketing campaign than a standalone offering in itself? That’s a hard question to answer, and a hard one to have to answer.