A Broken Mirror Held to History’s Face On the Narrative Use of Computer Screens, Multi Screen Experiences, and a Transmedia Theoretical Console in the Popular Assassin’s Creed Series

This paper presents media theorist Nanna Verhoeff’s concept of the theoretical console, as a popular and overt form of transmedia narrative. The theoretical console is taken to be a transmedia assemblage that draws attention to itself, as comprising diverse and meaningful media objects, that can be connected in a shared narrative. My main examples of this concept here are those popular video games that spatially juxtapose several types of computer screens and computer uses, with a narrative emphasis. With extensive references to theory on screened media and on transmedia narratives, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is my main example case study. Specifically, this game and its series peers encourage historiographic contemplations, by assembling a theoretical console across several media forms. Other popular video games from that series provide variations of this same transmedia constellation, this “theoretical console”. In its transmedia constellation, with a second screen mobile phone app, and other complementary screen media, the fictionalized history of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag implicates elements from its actual reality, across various forms of engagement. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag presents a high fidelity historical fiction, to be comprehensively enacted. It mirrors the player’s use of differing computer screens diegetically within playable frame story sections. In addition, the complementary affordances of the mobile phone app, and integrated social media websites, all encourage its player to stay involved in this fictional world, even outside immediate play. With this, the game draws many activities into a single transmedial fiction constellation. Moreover, the game diegetically references online repositories for both its fictionalized history, and actual history. This use of computer screens, to form a transmedia constellation in the form of an overt theoretical console, is shown to complement this popular game’s hypermediative narrative of a fictional shadow war secretly driving actual human history, which then meaningfully posits how to theorize history in our everyday lives.

Electronic Art: Modern Short Fiction Transmedia Storytelling in Japan

Digital modern fiction in Japan is a relatively new concept in literary waters, having its roots firmly placed in the 21st century. In the course over the last two decades, this branch of literary fiction has developed into a widespread sensation. The trendy “mobile phone novels” or keitai shousetsu differ from the traditional printed literary fiction because of several factors. Among these, we can take into account the writers, the audience, the form, the structure and the particular syntax, as well as the means and place of distribution. The writers are young authors whose mobile phone novels often lure to readers of the same age. Their uploaded novels into virtual platforms confirms the shapeshifting ways in which messages are sent from the addresser to the addressee in this virtual and technological era. These novels are created in such a way that they be intriguing due to the fact that creators and recipients are involved. It is interesting to point out that there is a certain phenomenon of mirror imagery between addressers and addressees since the keitai shousetsu readers tend to the same age and gender as the writers. Statistically speaking, the 86% of high schoolers, the 75% of middle schoolers and the 23% of grade schoolers, read mobile phone novels. This paper argues that keitai shousetsu can be seen as transmedia structures because they can involve a larger complex storyland which is shared and distributed on different media platforms.

Transmedia Narratives of Social Intervention: Affecting Reflexiveness in the Communicative Phenomenon as a Key Competence in Education

Highlighting the educational grounds of transmedia frameworks, this article acknowledges the positive impact of multimedia technology in cademic achievement and focuses on the examination of the reflexiveness in the communicative phenomenon as a key competence in education. In the search for a deeper understanding of the role that transmedia formats can play in both teaching and learning, the theoretical and conceptual ground for the analysis will follow the premises of the new field called TPCK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) and the well-known Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling. Moreover, a cognitive approach to narrative will be introduced to delineate the reflectiveness of the affection in linguistic and cognitive parameters.

Proto-Transmedial Narrative Structures: Lewis Carroll’s A Tangled Tale

This paper explores A Tangled Tale, a collection of mathematical puzzles that Charles Ludwick Dodgson serialized in The Monthly Packet between 1880 and 1885. The hybrid narrative patterns that present mathematical questions by means of fictional storytelling are a unique form of scientific knowledge dissemination that anticipates the breakdown of narrative linearity and the emergence of multiform formats present in transmedia. An inquiry into the Rule of Three and infinite regress tie the knots of a tale that highlights crucial insights on the algorithmic foregrounding of the strategies of transmedia design. Such strategies can be seen as the intersection of narrative as well as mathematical expertise that turn the media galaxy into a cosmic affair.

Off-Modern Hybridity in TV Theatre: Theatrical, Cinematic and Media Temporalities in Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (BBC - Illuminations Media, 2010)

Rupert Goold’s screen production of Macbeth – firstly, staged in 2007 and, later, filmed in 2010 – has been studied as an example of the stage-to-screen hybrid corpus of Shakespearean audio-visual adaptations. Thus, much of the critical emphasis on the production has been placed on its filmic qualities. Particularly, the genre film conventions deployed across the film has summoned the attention of Shakespeare on screen scholars and it has been the creators’ intentions to precisely point at Goold’s filmic intertextual repertoire. Given the recent increasing attention to the multiple media and languages employed in stage-to-screen hybrid Shakespearean adaptations and other exchanges between the languages of the stage and film to rework Shakespearean and theatrical productions, it is instructive to observe the ways in which adaptations such as this one engage with larger processes of transmedia storytelling, not only paying attention to theatrical and filmic languages but to the transmedia strategies these TV theatrical films make use of. Importantly, it is instructive to look into the narrative and philosophical purposes served by transmedia storytelling as the multiple media and languages used in the film display a range of temporalities and film genres associated to them that allow us to expand the interpretive range of Shakespeare’s source text. Following this premise, this essay examines Goold’s Macbeth as a nostalgia narrative in which transmedia strategies serve to display a range of media-based narrative strands that expand the film’s range of possible interpretations. To prove this, I will insert Goold’s film in the larger process of transmedia storytelling encompassing the performance history of Macbeth. Additionally, I will identify narrative strands in Goold’s televisual, theatrical, musical, poetic and computer-based sources. The results will show that Macbeth – and, by extension, potentially this applies to TV theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays – constitutes a strand of the larger corpus of transmedia storytelling wrapping up the Scottish play’s performance history as well as Shakespeare’s overall performance history.

New Possibilities in Audiovisual Ergodic Narratives

Espen J. Aarseth defined in his work Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) ergodic literature as one in which “a non-trivial effort is required to allow the reader to pass through the text”. Based on the analysis of a representative body of narratives found within the ergodic spectrum, this article aims to bring order to the classification of ergodic narratives; and contribute to the development of two possibilities of this type of narrative: transmedial and raccontian. Transmedial ergodic literature takes into account the new media and the latest technologies available to the teleuser in order to transform his limited role from decision making to an acting role in the narrative, becoming an off-stage character. The raccontian proposal is characterized by the application of alterations in the hidden layer of a storyline using the Schrödinger cat effect. Ergodic decision-making dynamics are applied in racconto scenes (Rondolino e Tomasi 1995) to manipulate the timeline prior to the story world’s starting point. This allows a greater diversification of outcomes by varying elements that usually remain inflexible and truncated. Two proposals that therefore affect different areas of transmedia communication, as we will demonstrate in this article.

From “Is” to the (News) World: How Facebook Jeopardized Its Life-Diary Nature and Occupied the Network

This article focuses on self-narratives and identity construction in the context of social networking sites (SNSs). It does so by discussing the findings of a research that had at its core a practice-based module titled “Facebook and Autobiography”, which was designed and taught at a major Hong Kong University. Through a cyber autoethnographic approach, which aligns to the methodological orientation of the second wave in narratology studies, the research explores how the infrastructure of Facebook affects the processes of self-narration in comparison with traditional written dairies. Contrary to previous studies, the interviews with students-participants and the analysis of their Facebook’s profiles suggest that the retrieval on Facebook of even small self-narratives is impaired by the fact that the platform has abandoned its life-diary orientation in favour of a news-based business model where the posthuman connotation of profiles prevails.

The Poetic Machines of Monsignor Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz

Monsignor Juan Caramuel, doctor universalis, built ingenious and multifaceted poetic machines not only to automate literary creation but also to multiply it. He called such poetic machines Labyrinths, “metric schemes” or even Ideae. These machines are the compositions that close the Apollos and the Muses of Metametrica (1663), a rhetorical treatise dedicated to a homonymous science. To whose invention he attributes himself. In this article, we analyze the functioning of these poetic machines and their place in the history of baroque ideas.

From the Metafunctions of Language to the Hyperfunctions. The New Multimodal Reality of Hypertext

Every act of communication stems from the existence of two individuals, who, at least, establish a relationship to share a particular type of information. That relationship will result in a communication model that, with the advent of information and communication technology, has undergone a remarkable change, so that the message is no longer linear or sequential to become a set of multiple relationships which affect the sender, recipient and message. Among the many changes that occur in this new communication model, one of which relates to the sociolinguistic springs that run through the relationship between sender and receiver. In this essay, we try to explain how these relationships work from a theoretical point of view, so that we can speculate a sort of model applicable to each enunciation. To do this we will start from the theoretical assumptions proposed by M.A.K. Halliday who, by combining autonomous linguistic sources with sociolinguistics, offered a theory of language known as “systemic functional”, being supported by the study of language as a system and by the functions arising from its use or metafunctions of the language, namely ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. In the telematic space, with the peculiarities that define hypertextual communication, the metafunctions became different from that described for oral and written environments. All of them will be hyperfunctions or multifunctions precisely because of the multimodal essence (text, image and sound) that houses them. We intend to theoretically bring the distances produced from the jump from the analogue environment to the digital environment, to propose a kind of specific theory for this new communicative space.