The original promise of transmedia

(…or, at least the promise as I understood it when I entered into the field many years ago)

When Henry Jenkins was among the first to popularise the term “transmedia storytelling” in 2003, way before I had even a notion of the practice and philosophy, he and others were describing something quite specific.  They were talking about a process where integral elements of a fiction would be dispersed systematically across multiple media and communication channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. The key words were “systematic” and “unified.” This was not repurposing the same content for different screens. It was designing a story architecture where each platform contributed something unique to the whole. A created story world could fit many stories and characters, and disperse these over different media as best suited the overall goal of the bigger project, with all parts combining to support each other, offering new entry points to audiences and so on.

The concept resonated deeply with those of us working in the space. Or with me at least, perhaps I shouldn’t speak for everyone else. I was among those who saw transmedia as the natural evolution of storytelling for a networked age,  a way to weave a single narrative, or many interconnected narratives, across multiple platforms and media formats, encouraging audiences to become active participants rather than passive consumers. Having played online on my first MMORPG (Finnish BatMUD in the early 90s) I knew that people wanted to connect and collaborate around a narrative, given the chance. 

For a time, these principles and ideas worked and a number of wonderful experiences were created. I myself experienced this with in a more limited scale with  projects like The Space Trainees ( a cross-media language learning show my team developed and co-produced, which combined television, web-based games, and classroom activities into a single narrative experience), demonstrating that children learned more effectively and engaged more deeply when the story surrounded them on multiple platforms. The project received an iEmmy nomination and even won an International E-Learning Award, but the real reward was seeing the methodology validated: multiplatform narrative design, when done purposefully and rigorously, has every chance of producing better outcomes than single-platform storytelling.

Why the promise could never be truly fulfilled

But ultimately, the wider industry struggled with transmedia for reasons that were structural, not creative. 

Coherence at scale. Maintaining narrative consistency across multiple platforms, oftentimes  with different creative teams, production timelines, and audience expectations, proved extraordinarily difficult for many projects. Story bibles helped, but in many cases these were static documents in a dynamic environment. A change in one platform’s storyline could cascade through the entire ecosystem in ways no document could anticipate. Which sort of is the point of transmedia storytelling, but is really difficult to pull of in a traditional media environment. 

Cost of content. True transmedia (if such a term applies, don’t ask me to define it though 🙂 ) required creating substantially different content for each platform. You could not simply reformat a television episode into a web or a mobile series. That was tried and tested and usually failed. Each platform needed native content that served the overall narrative while respecting the grammar of its specific medium. For most production budgets, often traditional ones, this was not ideal.

Audience coordination. Audiences rarely moved between platforms as cleanly as the theory suggested, which perhaps could’ve been gleaned from one’s own media use but still was a major part of the early days of transmedia. Getting a television viewer to also engage with an alternate-reality game, a podcast, and a social media campaign required not just good content but sophisticated audience design. You yourself needed to understand entry points, motivation structures, and the many effort thresholds beyond which people simply stopped participating. There’s only so many hours in the day, right? And a gazillion pieces of other entertainment and information to partake of.  

The marketing hijack. For me, a nail in the coffin was the co-option of the term. “Transmedia” became a buzzword that marketing departments used to describe any campaign that existed on more than one platform. A television show with a Twitter account was labelled “transmedia.” The term got, as I wrote in 2023, phased out by dilution. And I’ll admit, at the time, while I was sure the principles of transmedia storytelling were more than sound – they pointed to a utopian storytelling future! – I also stopped using the term in my pitches and development documents. 

See – you need the audience as well

Looking back, I believe one of the most crucial points of failure was the question of audience participation. Transmedia theory always placed the audience at the centre (and rightfully so!), not as consumers but as participants, co-creators, even collaborators. Jeff Gomez’s wondrous concept of the Collective Journey, which I discussed with Jeff on my podcast years ago, represented a fundamental shift. We could move from the Hero’s Journey, where a single protagonist carries the narrative, to a model where the audience itself becomes a collective protagonist. This resonated immensely with me, looking back at experiences from the transmedia music series “The Mill Sessions” and other projects I had been involved in. The audience wants to be active, to participate, to be the driver of the story… if they’re interested and invested. 

But the tools at the time did not fully exist to support this at scale. You could run an alternate-reality game for a few thousand dedicated fans (as Steve Peters et al well know 🙂). But crucially, you would have a much harder time building a narrative system that genuinely responded to audience input from millions of participants while maintaining coherent storytelling. 

The more I work with AI and the more I see how other people stretch the limits of what AI can dI feel that precisely such a gap is what AI now has the potential to close. Not by replacing human creativity, but by providing the connective tissue and framework that transmedia always needed and never had: ranging from dynamic coherence management to scalable personalisation, and responsive narrative systems that can incorporate audience input without collapsing into incoherence. I might be wrong and I might be naïve, but … I’m feeling the most optimistic about transmedia storytelling I have for over a decade and a half, today.