Continuum

Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20

Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: An

annotated syllabus

Henry Jenkins

To cite this article: Henry Jenkins (2010) Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: An
annotated syllabus, Continuum, 24:6, 943-958, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2010.510599

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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Vol. 24, No. 6, December 2010, 943–958

Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: An annotated syllabus

Henry Jenkins*

School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, California, USA

This article describes my experiences teaching a course on Transmedia Entertainment

and Storytelling at the University of Southern California, a course which sought to
bridge across multiple media and methodologies, to integrate the perspectives of
industry insiders, and to encourage students to apply what they learn to the challenge of
“pitching” a media franchise to a panel of creative practioners. The essay both shares
the syllabus as a resource for other teachers and reflects on the challenges of teaching
such cutting edge content.

[Electronic Arts game designer] Neil Young talks about ‘additive comprehension.’ He cites
the example of the director’s cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing
Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited viewers to question whether Deckard might
be a replicant: ‘That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending
. . . The challenge for us, especially with the Lord of the Rings is how do we deliver that one
piece of information that makes you look at the films differently?’
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006)

What follows is the syllabus I used in teaching a course on Transmedia Storytelling and
Entertainment at the University of Southern California. Like many of you, I see teaching
as a great chance to test and refine my evolving ideas in front of a critically engaged
audience. While I had been writing off and on about transmedia topics for some time, this
was the first time I had a chance to explore the concepts systematically through my
teaching. Teaching a class on transmedia is especially challenging – in part because the
topic represents an intersection between fields of research that are normally held as
methodologically separate.
First, by definition, teaching about transmedia requires us to move away from medium-
specific models for structuring the curriculum in favour of a comparative media
perspective, providing a context for helping students to think across media platforms and
to understand how they are interacting with each other in ever more complex ways. In
doing so, educators certainly need to be able to reflect critically on specific media
traditions, including film, television, comics, advertising, games, social networks, and
other digital practices. Yet they also have to be particularly attentive to the intersections
between them – the ways in which developments in one media space might influence what
takes place on other platforms and the ways in which information gets dispersed across the
entire entertainment system.
Second, such a course requires educators to be equally attentive to aesthetic questions
(formal and narrative analysis primarily), to trends in the creative industry, and to shifts in

*Email: hjenkins@usc.edu

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2010.510599
http://www.informaworld.com
944 H. Jenkins

audience behaviour. In teaching the course, I wanted to explore how work in Fan Studies,
for example, might intersect the discussions of engagement in the consumer research
tradition (see Part Four) and many of the essays that seem at first to be focusing on the
experience of the designers necessarily also deal with the ways in which audiences engage
with their content (see especially Week Five). Students were at first surprised and then
energized to see some of the fixed categories that had organized their other media studies
courses break down and felt liberated to be dealing with some of the kinds of materials –
action figures or amusement park attractions for example – which fall through the cracks
in such configurations. Such a course required me to stretch the limits of my own
theoretical formulations, learning from students and guests new questions to ask and new
approaches to thinking about what transmedia means as a set of production and reception
practices.
I first introduced my concept of transmedia storytelling in my Technology Review
column in 2003 and elaborated upon it through the ‘Searching for the Origami Unicorn:
The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling’ chapter in Convergence Culture. Young’s
evocation of the origami unicorn has remained emblematic, a kind of patron saint for what
has emerged as an increasingly passionate and motivated community of artists,
storytellers, brands, game designers, and critics/scholars, for whom transmedia has
become a driving cause in their creative and intellectual lives. We all have somewhat
different definitions of transmedia storytelling and, indeed, we don’t even agree on the
same term – with Frank Rose talking about ‘Deep Media’ and Christy Dena or Drew
Davidson talking about ‘Cross-media’.
Whatever we call it, transmedia entertainment is increasingly prominent in our
conversations about how media operate in a digital era – from recent books (such as
Jonathon Gray’s Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts and
Chuck Tryon’s Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence) to
dedicated websites (such as the Narrative Design Exploratorium [http://narrativedesign.
org/] which has been running a great series of interviews with transmedia designers and
storytellers) and websites created by transmedia producers, such as Jeff Gomez (http://
www.starlightrunner.com), to explain the concept to their clients. We are seeing senior
statesmen across multiple disciplines – from David Bordwell in film studies to Don
Norman in design research – weigh in on the aesthetics and design of transmedia
experiences. All of this influx of new interest invites us to pull back and lay out some core
principles that might shape our development or analysis of transmedia narrative and to
revise some of our earlier formulations of this topic.
Let me start with the following definition of transmedia storytelling as an operating
principle: ‘Transmedia storytelling represents 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.’
We should be clear that narrative represents simply one kind of transmedia logic that is
shaping the contemporary entertainment realm. We might identify a range of others –
including branding, spectacle, performance, games, perhaps others – which can operate
either independently or may be combined within any given entertainment experience. We
might also draw a distinction between transmedia storytelling and transmedia branding,
though these can also be closely intertwined. So, we can see something like Dark Lord:
The Rise of Darth Vader as an extension of the transmedia narrative that has grown up
around Star Wars because it provides back story and insights into a central character in that
saga. By comparison, a Star Wars breakfast cereal may enhance the franchise’s branding
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 945

but it may have a limited contribution to make to our understanding of the narrative or the
world of the story. The idea that Storm Troopers might be made of sugar sweet
marshmellow bits probably contradicts rather than enhances the continuity and coherence
of the fictional world that George Lucas was creating.
Where does this leave the Star Wars action figures? Well, they represent resources
where players can expand their understanding of the fictional world through their play.
Minimally, they enhance transmedia play, but in so far as coherent stories emerge through
this play, they may also contribute to the expansion of the transmedia story. And indeed,
writers like Will Brooker and Jonathon Gray have made compelling arguments for the
specific ways these toys expanded or reshaped the transmedia narrative, adding, for
example, to the mystique around Boba Fett.
While we are making distinctions, we need to distinguish between adaptation, which
reproduces the original narrative with minimum changes into a new medium and is
essentially redundant to the original work, and extension, which expands our
understanding of the original by introducing new elements into the fiction. Of course,
this is a matter of degree – since any good adaptation contributes new insights into our
understanding of the work and makes additions or omissions that reshape the story in
significant ways. But I think we can agree that Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet is an adaptation,
while Tom Stoppard’s Rosencranz & Guildenstern Are Dead expands Shakespeare’s
original narrative through its refocalization around secondary characters from the play.
My own early writing about transmedia may have over-emphasized the ‘newness’ of
these developments, excited as I was to see how digital media were extending the potential
for entertainment companies to deliver content around their franchises. Yet Derek Johnson
has made strong arguments that the current transmedia moment needs to be understood in
relation to a much longer history of different strategies for structuring and deploying
media franchises. Indeed, when I head to University of Southern California each morning
to teach, I am given a forceful reminder of these earlier stages in the evolution of
transmedia entertainment in the form of a giant statue of Felix the Cat which has sat atop a
local car dealership since the 1920s and has become a beloved Los Angeles landmark.
Felix, as Donald Crafton has shown us, was a transmedia personality, whose exploits
moved across the animated screen and comics to become the focus of popular music and
merchandizing, and he was one of the first personalities to get broadcast on network
American television. We might well distinguish Felix as a character who is extracted from
any specific narrative context (given each of his cartoons is self-contained and episodic) as
opposed to a modern transmedia figure who carries with him or her the timeline and the
world depicted on the ‘mother ship’, the primary work which anchors the franchise. Part
Five of the class traces the history of the transmedia impulse through such key figures as
L. Frank Baum, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Joss
Whedon.
The course in its current incarnation might only be taught at the University of Southern
California or some other school that is located close to the heart of the media industry. I
was able to take advantage of key thinkers and creators who lived in the Los Angeles area
as guest speakers, but also to tap into people from elsewhere who had reason to be passing
through Hollywood as part of their work. All of the speakers identified here covered their
own expenses and freely gave their time in part out of excitement to see the kinds of work
they are doing examined through the classroom and out of a desire to contribute to the
training of future media professionals working in this space. Many of them said that they
wished they had had a chance to take a class like this one at the start of their careers. Those
who live outside of key centres for the creative industries, however, can take advantage of
946 H. Jenkins

some of the online resources which have started to emerge around transmedia
entertainment, including podcasts and blog interviews with key transmedia creators.
The key point here is that transmedia needs to be understood as an ongoing
conversation between academic theorists and industry practitioners, that many of the key
conceptual leaps have been made by vernacular theorists working in the media fields and
trying to explain their own practices, and students need to be exposed to the more
pragmatic aspects of how transmedia works. For my students, hearing show runners and
game designers and advertising executives share their creative process and talk openly
about the assumptions they make about the current media environment and their fan
followings was one of the major revelations of the class. It pushed us beyond the
stereotype of the cigar-chomping media producer and helped them to understand how
theoretical ideas in the class might have real-world applications later in their careers. Too
often, theory and practice are held apart rather than exploring how creators draw on theory
to inform every aspect of their work, even if they use different language to discuss the
concepts than might emerge in a classroom setting. As the class went along, the pay-off
was in hearing students deftly combine academic and professional vocabularies in
discussing their work.
As I was working through the class, I was surprised how often I drew on secondary
materials on DVDs as resources – especially promotional materials which often had to
explain the connections between various segments of the franchise, and the making of
videos which often showed us the thinking behind the scenes shaping the unfolding of the
franchise. In one particularly rich class session, linked to Derek Johnson’s work, I played
about 10 minutes of ‘Scar’, an episode of Battlestar Galactica while playing the director’s
commentary from showrunner Ron Moore and his team. Moore’s commentary is
especially strong in showing the different kind of thinking which went into the design and
development of the series, showing how the episode fit within a larger continuity, how
background details flesh out the world, how they drew generic models from a range of
other texts both fiction and non-fiction, and how they situated the series in contrast with
other science fiction programs. At the same time, we discussed how access to this kind of
behind-the-scenes thinking impacts how readers respond to the series, reshaping
expectations, and leading to a push for even deeper insights into the characters, their
world, and the narrative actions. The wide availability of such materials expands our
capacity to bring practitioner voices into our teaching, even if you are not lucky enough to
be based in a media hub city.
The final project was the culmination of the class – a chance for students to draw on
the concepts they have been acquiring and apply them to think through creative and
commercial challenges that surround the production of a transmedia franchise. I had
developed this process at MIT through a week-long intensive workshop (which we
developed with Sande Scordes from Sony Imageworks) in which students would select an
existing media property and develop an approach for translating it into interactive
entertainment. The students would then pitch their approach to a panel of industry experts
who would critique their work from a variety of perspectives. We found that students were
more engaged with the course concepts when they saw them less as abstract ideas and
more as resources contributing to their final projects. My hunch that this approach might
work with USC students, many of whom aspired to enter the media industry, proved
correct, even though there was a shift in intensity moving from the one-week class at MIT
to the semester-long process at USC. Working in teams was a vital part of this process,
since it pushed students to combine their skills and expertise in ways that would not be
possible in individual projects, and since it forced them to argue amongst themselves about
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 947

their approaches and thus articulate more fully their theoretical assumptions. The projects
were pitched to a panel of judges for the final presentations that included a Hollywood art
director, a webisode producer, a digital media strategist, and an animation studio
executive. Students got conflicting advice from those in the old and new media industries,
giving them insights into the challenges that transmedia producers face in navigating their
projects across media sectors.
Trying to deal with transmedia texts in a classroom was more daunting than first
imagined. Teaching a film or a book is straightforward but the sheer scale of these texts
made it impossible to teach the work as a whole; discussions would need to rely on
students’ existing familiarity with the franchises to help them make sense of the
contribution of any given element. A survey on the first day of class, trying to assess
student familiarity with various franchises, discovered few points of contact across all of
the students. Each of them knew one or two of the franchises well, had a passing
familiarity with many of them, and were totally clueless about the rest. Even where they
knew the franchise well, they often knew the ‘mother ship’ but not its various ‘extensions’.
The syllabus included some specific media texts as examples to look at together but often
the discussions faltered, staying at a fairly superficial level: the class lacked the
background to deal with the texts on anything other than a highly abstract level. Students
were able to dig deeper on their individual assignments, where they could work with
franchises they already knew well, but there was difficulty developing a shared framework
of references across all students. And some students never had the emotional experience of
having all of the parts click together into a meaningful whole. Transmedia entertainment
depends on fan mastery and consumer loyalty that is difficult to replicate in a classroom
setting.
A second challenge in teaching the class reflects the current state of thinking about
transmedia issues. Most of the speakers were used to having to introduce the concept of
transmedia to their audiences; most were drawing on their standard presentations of their
template for the guest lecture. So, while students were deeply immersed in these
conversations, each speaker started at square one, laying out core premises, and working
through now classic examples. The speakers did best when they chose a specific project
they were working on and took the class through the thinking that guided their decision
making. There was a truly spectacular moment, for example, when the creator of an
Alternative Reality Game put up his flow sheets around the room and took the class
episode by episode through how the elements of the game connected to what viewers saw
on the television series. Academic writing was little better – everyone covers the broad
territory and there is still very little work that drills deep around individual concepts or
even specific projects. As a result, the early sessions of the class (Part One) felt rushed as
we needed to lay out everything at once, while later sessions felt sparser, as if we were
returning to what was by now well-trodden ground.
Teaching the class culminated in a new formulation of the concept of transmedia
storytelling which I presented at the Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT. You can
watch a podcast of that talk and read a written version at http://www.henryjenkins.org/
2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.htmlxx. The talk identifies a range of core
concepts that might shape future discussions of the topics. Of these concepts, I found that
‘subjectivity’ was the topic that is least well represented in the current incarnation of the
course. One of the powerful things that transmedia stories can do is shift our perspectives,
showing us what the events look like from the point of view of secondary and sometimes
opposing characters. I found myself improvising one class lecture on how the
manipulations of perspective in epistolary literature connected to the creation of fabricated
948 H. Jenkins

documents in contemporary alternative reality games. Next time I teach the class I will
explore this dimension more fully.
The other idea that emerged most forcefully for my students and me was ‘multiplicity’.
Most of the speakers clung to the idea that a transmedia story depends on a firmly
established continuity and thus on the tight regulation of the rollout of information. Yet my
work on superheroes comics has shown an alternative pattern, where the pleasure of the
audience rested on seeing familiar characters and situations told in radically different
guises, reflecting the vision of different creative artists, often repositioned in different
genres or cultural contexts. Read in this way, we saw something different looking back at
The Animatrix, a key early example of transmedia practice, and we now had a way of
imagining fan fiction or video remixes as a different kind of transmedia extension, thus
opening space for more flexible kinds of relations between media producers and
consumers. These two concepts reflect the degree to which teaching a class, especially in a
new field, is always a discovery process, one where the instructor learns as much as they
teach.
Looking back on the class, one of its failings is that it is so American-centric. Creative
experiments in transmedia storytelling are occurring around the world. While the course
spent a limited amount of time on ‘media mix’ in Japan (Ito) as an alternative to and
influence on American practice, it did not deal sufficiently with experiments taking place
as the Canadian Film Board makes transmedia extensions a priority in its funding
schemes, as European broadcasters adopt a more avant-garde and less commercial vision
for this approach, as it gets taken up by the producers of Telenovelas across the Latin
world, or as it gets deployed across Australia and New Zealand. Despite the efforts of
researchers such as Christie Dena who maintains a rich website full of resources for
thinking about these developments, there is still insufficient exchange of resources and
case studies within a global scholarly community to make introducing such materials into
the classroom fully practical. I am hoping that publishing this syllabus here will spark
some new cultural exchanges around the topic.

Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment

Course description and outcomes
We now live at a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out
across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in
corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. The
concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties
that can exploit ‘synergies’ between different parts of the medium system and ‘maximize
touch-points’ with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards
franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.
A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a
range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from
television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other
commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most
dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the
franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay,
game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story
world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of
narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an
encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 949

individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online

knowledge communities.
The course is broken down into five basic units: ‘Foundations’ offers an overview of
the current movement towards transmedia or cross-platform entertainment; ‘Narrative
Structures’ introduces the basic toolkit available to contemporary storytellers, digging
deeply into issues around seriality, and examining what it might mean to think of a story as
a structure of information; ‘World Building’ deals with what it means to think of
contemporary media franchises in terms of ‘worlds’ or ‘universes’ which unfold across
many different media systems; ‘Audience Matters’ links transmedia storytelling to issues
of audience engagement and in the process considers how fans might contribute unofficial
extensions to favorite media texts; and ‘Tracing the History of Transmedia’ pulls back to
consider key moments in the evolution of transmedia entertainment, moving from the late
nineteenth century to the present.
In this course, we will be exploring the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling
through:
. Critically examining commercial and grassroots texts that contribute to larger media
franchises (mobisodes and webisodes, comics, games).
. Developing a theoretical framework for understanding how storytelling works in
this new environment, with a particular emphasis upon issues of world building,
cultural attractors, and cultural activators.
. Tracing the historical context from which modern transmedia practices emerged,
including consideration of the contributions of such key figures as P.T. Barnum,
L. Frank Baum, Feuillade, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, Walt
Disney, George Lucas, DC and Marvel Comics, and Joss Whedon.
. Exploring what transmedia approaches contribute to such key genres as science
fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero, suspense, soap opera, teen and reality television.
. Listening to cutting-edge thinkers from the media industry talk about the challenges
and opportunities which transmedia entertainment offers, walking through cases of
contemporary projects that have deployed cross-platform strategies.
. Putting these ideas into action through working with a team of fellow students to
develop and pitch transmedia strategies around an existing media property.

Required books
Pat Harrington and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast
Narratives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 636 pages.
Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007), 136 pages.
Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (Marvel Comics, 2003), 216 pages.
Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra,
1995), 416 pages.
Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007), 136 pages.
All additional readings will be provided through the Blackboard site for the class.

Grading and assignments

In order to fully understand how transmedia entertainment works, students will be
expected to immerse themselves into at least one major media franchise for the duration of
the term. You should consume as many different instantiations (official and unofficial) of
950 H. Jenkins

this franchise as you can and try to get an understanding of what each part contributes to
the series as a whole.
COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PAPER: For the first paper, you will be asked to write a
5– 7 page essay examining one commercially produced media extension (comic, website,
game, mobisode, amusement park attraction, etc.). You should try to address such issues as
its relationship to the story world, its strategies for expanding the narrative, its deployment
of the distinctive properties of its platform, its targeted audience, and its cultural
attractors/activators. (20 Percent)
GRASSROOTS EXTENSION PAPER: For the second paper, you will be asked to write
a 5– 7 page essay examining a fan-made extension (fan fiction, discussion list, video, etc.)
and try to understand where the audience has sought to attach themselves to the franchise,
what they add to the story world, how they respond to or route around the invitational
strategies of the series, and how they reshape our understanding of the characters, plot or
world of the original franchise. (20 Percent)
FINAL PROJECT – FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: Students will be
organized into teams, which for the purpose of this exercise will function as transmedia
companies. You should select a media property (a film, television series, comic book,
novel, etc.) that you feel has the potential to become a successful transmedia franchise. In
most cases, you will be looking for a property that has not yet added media extensions,
though you could also look at a property that you feel has been mishandled in the past. By
the end of the term, your team will be ‘pitching’ this property. The pitch should include a
briefing book that describes:
(1) The core defining properties of the property.
(2) A description of the intended audience(s).
(3) A discussion of the specific plans for each media platform you are going to deploy.
(4) An overall description for how you will seek to integrate the different media
platforms to create a coherent world.
(5) A business plan which includes likely costs and revenue and the timetable for
rolling out the various media elements.
(6) Parallel examples of other properties which have deployed the strategies being
described.
The pitch itself will be a 20 minute group presentation, followed by 10 minutes of
questioning. The presentation should give us a ‘taste’ of what the property is like as well as
to lay out some of the key elements that are identified in the briefing book. For an example
of what these pitches might look like, watch the materials assembled at http://www.
educationarcade.org/SiDA/videos, which shows how a similar activity was conducted at
MIT. Each member of the team will be expected to develop expertise around a specific
media platform as well as to contribute to the overall strategies for spreading the property
across media systems. The group will select its own team leader who will be responsible
for contacts with the instructor and will coordinate the presentation. The team leader will
be asked to provide feedback on what each team member contributed to the effort, while
team members will be asked to provide an evaluation of how the team leader performed.
Team members will check in with the instructor on Week Ten and Week Fourteen to
review their progress on the assignment. Presentation Briefing Book (40 Percent)
CLASS FORUM: For each class session, students will be asked to contribute a
substantive question or comments via the class forum. Comments should reflect an
understanding of the readings for that day as well as an attempt to formulate an issue that
we can explore through class discussions or with the visiting speakers. (20 Percent)
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 951

Class schedule
Part One: Foundations
Week 1
August 24: Transmedia Storytelling 101

Henry Jenkins, ‘Transmedia Storytelling 101’, ‘Confessions of an Aca-Fan’, http://

henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html
Henry Jenkins, ‘Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmeda
Storytelling’, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York:
New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93 –130.
Geoff Long, ‘What Is Transmedia Storytelling’, Transmedia Storytelling: Business,
Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, http://cms.mit.edu/research/
theses.php, pp. 13 –69.

August 26: Intertextual Commodities?

P. David Marshall, ‘The New Intertextual Commodity’, in Dan Harries (ed.) The New
Media Book (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 69– 81.
Derek Johnson, ‘Intelligent Design or Godless Universe? The Creative Challenges of
World Building and Franchise Development’, Franchising Media Worlds: Content
Networks and The Collaborative Production of Culture, PhD Dissertation, University
of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009, pp. 170 – 279.
Watch:
Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy

Week 2
August 31: Media Mix in Japan

Anne Allison, ‘Pokemon: Getting Monsters and Communicating Capitalism’, Millennial

Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), pp. 192 –233.
David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, ‘Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in
Children’s Media Culture’, in Joseph Tobin (ed.), Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The
Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 12– 33.
Mizuko Ito, ‘Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix’, Beyond Barbie and
Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge: MIT, 2008),
pp. 97 –110.

September 2: Toys and Tales

Jeff Gomez, ‘Creating Blockbuster Worlds’ (unpublished)

Henry Jenkins, ‘Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner’s Jeff Gomez’,
‘Confessions of an Aca-Fan’, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2008/05/an_interview_
with_starlight_ru.html
Mark Federman, ‘What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message?’, http://individual.
utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm
952 H. Jenkins

Guest Speakers:
Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner
Jordan Greenhill, DivX

Week 3
September 9: Transmedia Branding

Faris Yacob, ‘I Believe Children are the Future’, http://www.slideshare.net/NigelG/

ipa-thesis-i-believe-the-children-are-our-future
Henry Jenkins, ‘How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning . . . ’,
‘Confessions of an Aca-Fan’, http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_
storytelling_be.html and http://henryjenkins.org/2006/12/how_transmedia_story
telling_be_1.html

Guest Speaker: Faris Yacob, McCann Erickson New York

Week 4
September 14: Heroes and Alchemists: The New Storytelling

The 9th Wonders, Chapters 1 –9, http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/novels_library.

shtml?novel ¼ 9
Henry Jenkins, ‘“We Had So Many Stories to Tell”: The Heroes Comics as Transmedia
Storytelling’, ‘Confessions of an Aca-Fan’, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_
so_many_stories_to_tell.html
Carolyn Handler Miller, ‘Using a Transmedia Approach’, Digital Storytelling: A
Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2006), pp. 149 –
164 (Rec.)

Guest Speakers: Mauricio Mota, Mark Warshaw, The Alchemists

Part Two: Narrative Structures

September 16: Seriality

Angela Ndalianis, ‘Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo-)Baroque Narrative Formation’, Neo-

Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004),
pp. 31 – 70.
Jason Mittell, ‘All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic’
(Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 429– 438.
Jennifer Haywood, ‘Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial’, Consuming
Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera
(University of Kentucky Press, 1997), pp. 21 – 51 (Rec.)

Week 5
September 21: Soaps Go Transmedia

Sharon Marie Ross, ‘Managing Millennials: Teen Expectations of Tele-Participation’,

Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet (London: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 124– 172.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 953

Sam Ford, ‘From Oakdale Confidential to L.A. Diaries: Transmedia Storytelling for
ATWT’, As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture (Master’s Thesis), pp. 141 –
162.
Louisa Stein, ‘Playing Dress Up: Digital Fashion and Game Extensions of
Televisual Experience in Gossip Girl’s Second Life’, Cinema Journal, Spring 2009,
no.3, pp. 116– 122.

September 23: Creating Alternate Realities

Christy Dena, ‘Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in

Alternate Reality Games’, Convergence, February 2008, pp. 41 –58.
Jane McGonigal, ‘Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming’, in
Katie Salen (ed.), Ecologies of Play (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 199– 228,
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.199
Dave Szulborski, ‘Puppetmastering: Creating a Game’ and ‘Puppetmastering: Running a
Game’, This is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (New York: New
Fiction, 2005), pp. 207 –284.

Guest Speaker: Evan Jones, Stitch Media

COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PROJECT DUE

Week 6
September 28: Speaking of Serials

Kim Deitch, Alias the Cat (New York: Pantheon, 2007). (Required Book.)
David Kalat, ‘The Long Arm of Fantomas’ (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 211– 225.

September 30: The Unfolding Text

Neil Perryman, ‘Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia
Storytelling’, Convergence, February 2008, pp. 21 –40.
Lance Perkin, ‘Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the “Rules” of Doctor Who Affect
the Writing’ (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 13 –24.
Matt Hills, ‘Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variations on a Narrative Theme: Doctor
Who (2005) as Cult/Mainstream TV’ (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 333 – 343.

Part Three: World-Building

Week 7
October 5: Migratory Characters

William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, ‘I’m Not Fooled by that Cheap Disguise’, in
Roberta E. Pearson, The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a
Superhero and his Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 182 – 213.
Will Brooker, ‘Establishing the Brand: Year One’, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a
Cultural Icon (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 36 – 67.
954 H. Jenkins

Bob Kane, ‘The Legend of the Batman’ (1938) and Bob Kane, ‘The Origins of the
Batman’ (1948), in Dennis O’Neil (ed.), The Secret Origins of the DC Superheroes
(New York: DC, 1976), pp. 36 – 50.
Bob Kane, ‘The First Batman’ (1956) and Dennis O’Neil, ‘There is No Hope in Crime
Alley’ (1978), The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (New York: DC, 1988).

Guest Speaker: Geoffrey Long, GAMBIT

October 7: World Building in Comics

Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 1999), pp. 129 – 133.
Jason Bainbridge, ‘Worlds within Worlds: The Role of Superheroes in the Marvel and DC
Universe’, in Angela Ndalianis (ed.), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New
York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 64 – 85.
Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins, ‘Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics’ (Harrington
and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 303 – 313.
Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, Marvels (New York: Marvel Comics, 1993). (Required
Book.)
Alec Austin, ‘Hybrid Expectations, Expectations across Media’, CMS Thesis, pp. 97– 127.

Week 8
October 12: Who Watches the Watchman?

Stuart Moulthrop, ‘See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media’
(Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 287– 303.

Watch:
NBS Nightly News with Ted Philips, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ nd5cInmK6LQ&
playnext_from ¼ PL&feature ¼ PlayList&p ¼ 878F6464EEBE32F9&index ¼ 10
The Keene Act and YOU, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ qkWGZ1G7TAE&
playnext_from ¼ PL&feature ¼ PlayList&p ¼ 878F6464EEBE32
Saturday Morning Watchmen, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ YDDHHrt6l4w

October 14: World Building in Science Fiction

Walter Jon Williams, ‘In What Universe?’ (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 25 – 32.
George R.R. Martin, ‘On the Wild Cards Novels’, in Pat Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin
(eds.), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
Cordwainer Smith, ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’ and ‘The Ballad of Lost C’mell’, in
J.J. Pierce (ed.), The Best of Cordwainer Smith (New York: Del Rey, 1975), pp. 124 –
209, 315– 337.

Week 9
October 19: Launching a New World
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 955

David Lavery, ‘Lost and Long-Form Television Narrative’ (Harrington and Wardrip-
Fruin), pp. 313 –323.

Guest Speaker: Jesse Alexander, Executive Producer, Year One

October 21: Transmedia and Social Change

Guest Speaker: Bram Pitoyo, Wild Alchemy

Part Four: Audiences

Week 10
October 26: The Logic of Engagement

Ivan Askwith, ‘The Expanded Television Text, “Five Logics of Engagement”’; ‘Lost at
Television’s Crossroads’, Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement
Medium, CMS thesis, pp. 51– 150.

Guest Speaker: Ivan Askwith, Big Spaceship

October 28: Expanding the Audience

Kim Moses and Ian Sander, selections from Ghost Whisperer: The Spirit Guide
(New York: Titan Books, 2008).

Guest Speaker: Kim Moses, Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer

Week 11
November 2: Fan Productivity

Jesse Walker, ‘Remixing Television: Francesca Coppa on the Vidding Underground’,

Reason, August/September 2008, http://www.reason.com/news/show/127432.html
Francesca Coppa, ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding’,
Transformative Works and Cultures (2008), http://journal.transformativeworks.org/
index.php/twc/article/view/44/64
Bud Caddell, ‘Becoming a Mad-Man’, http://drop.io/becomingamadman

November 4: The Encyclopedic Impulse

Janet Murray, ‘Digital Environments are Encyclopedic’, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The
Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 83 – 90.
Bob Rehak, ‘That Which Survives: Star Trek’s Design Network in Fandom and Franchise’
(Unpublished), pp. 2– 79.
Robert V. Kozinets, ‘Inno-Tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia’, Consumer Tribes (London:
Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007), pp. 194 – 209.

Watch:
Star Trek: Phase II ‘In Harm’s Way’, http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/episodes.html
956 H. Jenkins

Week 12
November 9: The Power of Details

Kristin Thompson, ‘Not Your Father’s Tolkien’ and ‘Interactive Middle Earth’, The Frodo
Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), pp. 53 –74, 224 –256,
C.S. Lewis, ‘On Stories’, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harvest,
2002), pp. 3– 21.

November 11: Ephemeral Fascinations

Michael Bonesteel, ‘Henry Darger’s Search for the Grail in the Guise of a Celestial Child’
(Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin), pp. 253 – 267.
Amelie Hastie, ‘The Collector: Material Histories, Colleen Moore’s Dollhouse, and
Ephemeral Recollection’, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 19– 72.

Week 13
November 16: Independent Horrors

James Castonguay, ‘The Political Economy of the Indie Blockbuster: Fandom,

Intermediality, and The Blair Witch Project’, in Sarah L. Higley and Jeffrey Andrew
Weinstock (eds.), Nothing That Is: Milllennial Cinema and the Blair Witch
Controversies (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2004), pp. 65 – 86.
The Blair Witch Project Website, http://www.blairwitch.com/
Head Trauma Website, http://www.headtraumamovie.com/

Guest Speaker: Lance Weiller, Head Trauma

Part Five: Tracing the History of Transmedia

November 18: Before the Rainbow

Neil Harris, ‘The Operational Aesthetic’, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 59– 90.
Mark Evan Swartz, ‘A Novel Enchantment’, Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), pp. 161 – 172.

Week 14
November 23: What Uncle Walt Taught Us

J.P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004).

Karal Ann Marling, ‘Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks’, in Karal Ann Marling (ed.),
Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (Montreal: Centre
Canadian d’Architecture, 1997), pp. 29 –178 (Rec.)
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 957

November 25: Franchises and Attractions

Henry Jenkins, ‘The Pleasure of Pirates and What it Tells Us About World Building in
Branded Entertainment’, ‘Confessions of an Aca-Fan’, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/
06/forced_simplicity_and_the_crit.html
Don Carson, ‘Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons
Learned from the Theme Park Industry’, Gamasutra, http://www.gamasutra.com/
features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm

Week 15
November 30: Lessons from Lucas

Jonathon Gray, ‘Learning to Use the Force: Star Wars Toys and Their Films’, Show Sold
Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media ParaTexts (New York: New York
University Press, 2010), pp. 232– 247.
Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York:
Continuum, 2002), ‘The Fan Betrayed’, pp. 79 –99, ‘Canon’, pp. 101 – 114.
Kevin J. Anderson (ed.), Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (New York: Spectra, 1995).
(Required Book.)

December 2: Across the Whedonverse

Tanya Krzywinska, ‘Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning Out of Long Narrative in
World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (Harrington and Wardrip-Fruin),
pp. 385– 399.
Joss Whedon, The Long Way Home (New York: Dark Horse, 2007). (Required Book.)
Watch:
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-a-
long-blog

December 7: Student Presentations

Notes on contributor
Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the
University of Southern California. He is the author of thirteen books, including Convergence
Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, and is now completing work on Spreadable Media:
Creating Value in a Networked Culture (with Sam Ford and Joshua Green).

References
Bordwell, David. 2009. Now leaving Platform 1. Observations on Film Art, 19 August. http://www.
davidbordwell.net/blog/?p¼5264.
Crafton, Donald. 1993. Before Mickey: The animated film, 1898– 1928. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Davidson, Drew. 2010. Cross-media communications: An introduction to the art of creating
integrated media experiences. Pittsburgh: Lula Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2003. Transmedia storytelling. Technology Review, 15 January. http://www.
technologyreview.com/Biotech/13052/?a¼f.
Norman, Donald. 2009. The transmedia design challenge: Co-creation., http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/
the_transmedia_design_challenge_co-creation.html.
958 H. Jenkins

Rose, Mark. Ongoing. Deep Media., http://www.deepmediaonline.com/.

Tryon, Chuck. 2009. Reinventing cinema: Movies in the age of media convergence. Piscataway, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.

Some online resources for bringing transmedia thinkers into your classroom
What is Transmedia? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ zyjg6-7LJPg&feature ¼ related.
Futures of Entertainment: Cult Media. http://www.convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/
2007/program/index.html.
Futures of Entertainment: Fan Labor. http://www.convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/
2007/program/index.html.
Futures of Entertainment: Global Media. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/01/how_brazil_is_
reshaping_the_fu.html.
Futures of Entertainment: Transmedia Activism. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/on_chuck_
and_carrot_mobs_mappi.html.
Futures of Entertainment: Fan Cultures. http://cms.mit.edu/news/2006/12/futures_of_
entertainment_2006_5.php.
Futures of Entertainment: Franchising and World Building. http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/
convergenceculture/videos/1607-futures-of-entertainment-3 – -session-5-franchising-extensions-
and-worldbuilding.
Futures of Entertainment: Transmedia Properties. http://cms.mit.edu/news/2006/12/
futures_of_entertainment_2006_3.php.
Defining ARGS. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ h80PpcV_kug.
Creativity and Social Media. http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/uploaded_images/Screen-
shot-2010-01-27-at-2.25.52-PM-Jan-27,-2010-725160.png.
Transmedia Hollywood – COMING SOON.
Blair Witch Project Case Study. http://current.com/items/90751614_blair-witch-producer-
reveals-fan-building-that-drove-distribution.htm.
J.J. Abrams. http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html.
Jeff Gomez. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ YfH8WwClSx0.
http://vimeo.com/8842277.
Joshua Green. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ Bci5zSOFABM&feature ¼ related.
Henry Jenkins. http://vimeo.com/4672634.
Geoffrey Long. http://videolog.uol.com.br/video.php?id ¼ 481038.
Alex McDowell. http://futuresofentertainment.org/2009/08/foe-3-when-comics-converge-making--
watchmen/.
Mark Warshaw and Jesse Alexander. http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/538.
Lance Weiller. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ iCPEq2_8Lxg.