Worldbuilding as "Transmedia Play"
How testing your story can IMPROVE your story
If you’ve followed me and my work for some time, you’ll probably at this point know me as a major proponent of transmedia storytelling. Some of you will know what that means. For others, you may have never heard the phrase “transmedia storytelling” before. But, even if you haven’t heard of it, you are undoubtedly familiar with its influence.
Transmedia storytelling, simply put is when a large fictional world is taken and explored through multiple media platforms. By designing in this way, the creator/s can investigate their world, pulling stories from it in an organic way that works uniquely with their chosen medium/s. With this approach, we aren’t talking adaptations. Rather, each new piece tells its own adventure whilst also contributing to a larger plot. Individual pieces make sense as standalones, but audiences are rewarded for engaging with the storyworld as a whole.
We see examples of transmedia storytelling in things like The Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Walking Dead, The Unknown 9, Final Fantasy, Game of Thrones, Ultraman, Harry Potter, and more. Not all have been successful in their attempts (transmedia is exceedingly difficult to do!), but at the very least, they show us the hunger audiences have for fully immersive and emotionally resonant fictional worlds.
With all this being said, I’m not here to talk to you today about the specifics of transmedia storytelling (we’ll save that for another time!) Instead, I want to discuss the use of transmedia storytelling as a worldbuilding technique and a way to playtest your work.
Coming from the video games industry, I’ve seen and contributed to playtesting a lot. When designing a video game, one of the consistent jobs needing to be done is surprise, surprise - playing the most recent version of the game and trying to break it. We do this to highlight issues in the project so they can be resolved before the game releases to audiences. The playtesting team dilligently goes through it all, pressing buttons, trying to find bugs, looking for things that will annoy, or worse - disrupt the player’s experience. Once discovered, playtesters communicate with other teams in a studio to create fixes, thus polishing the project continuously as they march towards release.
We do this for games constantly. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, rarely is such devotion to smoothing out rough edges directed at the narrative itself. Sure, we do edits and revisions, multiple drafts, and required sign-offs from stakeholders, but this isn’t really playtesting. These moments of honing are important, but they exist within one specific lens - the final experience. An important lens, for sure! But not the end-all-and-be-all that many are led to believe it is. Operating through the lens of the final experience is crucial to creating something fun and engaging, but there’s so much more we can do in addition to that to build impressively immersive worlds.
That’s what I want to discuss today. The use of transmedia storytelling as a form of playtesting. By taking the time to explore our worlds through different kinds of mediums, we are able to see with greater clarity what works, what doesn’t, and what is missing.
Transmedia playtesting differs from traditional narrative development as it’s end goal is not the same. With a traditional approach (drafting, redrafting, editing, receiving feedback, etc.), the aim is to end up with something tight, streamlined, audience-tested and ready to go to market. Transmedia playtesting aims not for a final product, but for a cohesive world that is as deep as it is wide. In this sense, we can consider transmedia playtesting as the step one takes either before or alongside a traditional editing approach. If traditional editing is about polishing, then transmedia playtesting is more like running a simulation (or several) to see how well your world functions as an immersive environment.
Transmedia playtesting has a knack for revealing blindspots in our worldbuilding and narrative design. Since transmedia stories need to function as standalone pieces and contribute to a larger whole, transmedia playtesting forces the very structure of your fictional world to work on its own - it’ll either break down, or sail smooth. It’s also a great way to find out (if you don’t already know), which mediums are best suited for what you’re trying to do. And, if your aim is building a transmedia franchise, well… the benefits of this process should be self-evident.
So, what does Transmedia Playtesting look like exactly? And how do we do it? Let’s break it down.
As a Narrative Designer, for me, the typical process of developing any sort of project tends to go like this:
We begin with an idea. A page or two outlining the basic narrative conceit of the project. When working for a studio, or on a contract, this idea is more often than not handed to me by the developers or creative director. It is a template for what will come.
Going through the one-pager idea, we highlight key characters, phrases, concepts, locations, etc. These are areas in which worldbuilding can be developed around. The highlights act as the initial content plan for a story bible (also known as a world guide.)
We build out the story bible. Starting with the subjects we highlighted in step 2, we write little articles or essays about them. Once those are done, we use the story bible instead of the one-pager, going through it again and highlighting any new key concepts that have come from our initial work. They become the next lot of essays in the document. We repeat this process until we have something substantial enough to work with. The story bible is usually intended for internal eyes only. It acts as a narrative design blueprint for the rest of the development team (or teams) to work from when constructing their contributions to the project.
At this point, we typically then move into audience-facing content design. A plot synopsis that shows the path characters (or the player in the case of a video game) take through the story world from start to finish. Dialogue scripts and any other narrative components intended for the audience to engage with are also done here.
The final step, which often takes place alongside step 4 is the traditional editing process. Drafting, redrafting, receiving a yes, no, or feedback from stakeholders or others. The work is honed, spit-shined and then sent off to the next stage, with narrative designers usually acting as consultants going forward.
Sometimes these steps happen one after the other, but more often than not (in a professional environment) they tend to happen concurrently. This is because in a professional environment, we’re constantly under-the-gun to hit deadlines. I’m sure you can argue the business benefits of this, but from a storytelling perspective, it can be rough. Sure, moving speedily can help with making sure the work doesn’t get bogged down, but it also means that in many cases, you’re submitting work you’re maybe not entirely happy with, or work that contains issues with immersion and emotional resonance.
However, if we slow the process down just a little bit and add the extra step of transmedia playtesting in between 4 and 5, we stand a much better chance in avoiding those issues.
Take your story bible as a blueprint for the world and start applying it to different writing mediums. Write some short stories, develop a paper game, pen screenplays, audio dramas and comic book scripts, draw and paint, make music… follow your bliss. Explore your world in this way to find out how it ticks. All this works because with each writing medium, there is a new kind of narrative language to learn and play with, and each narrative language exposes your world in different ways. Laid bare, you can now see what’s important, what’s superfluous, and what’s missing.
For example:
Short stories (or any form of prose really) are powerful in conveying character depth. With prose, we get to move inside the minds of our heroes and villains. We learn their motivations, their fears, their irrationalities, and most importantly, how they think. Regardless of whether you write in first person present tense (my favourite), or third-person, eye-of-god, past tense, or something else, you’ll undoubtedly uncover hidden things you didn’t know before about your characters. You’ve likely written out their backstory as a character profile within your story bible, but by writing about them in prose, you get to experience those backstories (or the lingering emotions and traumas that came from them) in a more personal and intimate way. Writing prose helps identify character complexities - those little hooks that can be used to build empathy in the minds of your audience.
Scripts on the other hand - be they for the screen, a podcast/audio drama, comics or something else, force you to consider more external elements related to character and setting. Seperated from what characters think or feel internally, scripts provide two key limitations: in a script, you can only write what they says, or see.
For the say: playtesting in this way lets you explore character voice. Not just what your characters say, but how they say it. Through their words, we can show glimpses of their internal lives. Through their words, we can figure out whether all of our characters share the same voice (yours!), or whether they stand alone as individuals with their own unique vocabularies and outlooks on life.
For the see: We learn more about the world itself. Is it exciting? Is it visually arresting? Does it make sense structurally? In the case of more fantastical narratives, this limitation also helps us analyze whether or not the world is believable, or whether it’s too conceptual for an audience to connect with emotionally.
Games focus on the structural and experiental nature of your work. As a medium that operates through systems, it reveals whether the systems of your world are too complicated, whether they make sense, and how well the worldbuilding works to immerse people. If your end goal is to build some sort of game around your IP, then playtesting here has obvious advantages. It can reveal how well your world and characters interact with each other and with your players.
Regardless of which mediums you choose to playtest through, they all contribute to providing a larger, more detailed picture of what you currently have. By approaching your design in this way, you can highlight inconsistencies, plot holes, logical gaps, and underdeveloped themes. It can also reveal where a tonal throughline is needed, and which characters are core to your world. And once you have a list of things to work on, you can go back to your story bible and redraft.
This method is how I’ve approached my most ambitous personal project to date. FarBodies is a transmedia IP that I’ve been developing with Tentacular Studios for five years now. If you want to know what it’s about, you can check out our newsletter here.
What began as (quite frankly, a rip-off of Assassins Creed and Vampire: The Masquerade) has now transformed into its own unique beast as a result of transmedia playtesting. After exploring my story bible in multiple mediums, I’ve found myself going back and removing huge amounts of unneeded content, whilst adding huge amounts of different content that is far more relevant to our end goal. Through transmedia playtesting, we’ve learned more specific details about our audience as well. Instead of marking a target audience and building to sell to them, we built our IP first, and then through this process, allowed the fictional world to reveal our audience to us. It’s more organic.
Through this approach, we’re not just selling a product designed by commity. We are instead, presenting a world to an audience and inviting them to find themselves within it.
Transmedia playtesting pushes us in new directions. Ones more hollistic than the cynical late-stage capitalism we’re used to. When we know our world like we know the real one, even if not all the content makes it into the final release, our audiences gain a richer experience and a strong, personal, emotional connection to the IP.
They may not know all the details about how things work, but they can feel it. And that feeling is the ilusive white whale we’re all chasing. It’s a hard thing to explain. This thing that is almost ephemeral, almost invisible to our audiences. But it draws them in. It’s the sweet spot. The “grey space in the middle” - as David Bowie once said. A playground that can’t quite be defined, but affords audiences a sense of personal connection and co-ownership to our worlds all the same. It’s the “it”, the “spark”, that keeps them coming back, time and time again.
Nick.