Transmedia storytelling is a technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats, recognized for its use by mass media to develop media franchises.^[1] The Labyrinth Project’s Marsha Kinder calls these franchises “commercial transmedia supersystems” in her 1991 book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She goes on to say “transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful players while disavowing commercial manipulation.”^[2]

In 2003, then MIT media studies professor, Henry Jenkins used the term in his MIT Technology Review article, “Transmedia Storytelling,” where he reflected Kinder’s assumption, via analysis of mass-market entertainment, that the coordinated use of storytelling across platforms can make the characters more compelling.^[3] Under the mentorship of Kinder, Stephen Dinehart, used transmedia storytelling as a development methodology, conceptualizing transmedial play and viewer/user/player (VUP). In the paper “Transmedial Play” he relates transmedia storytelling to Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (“the total artwork”).^[4] Dinehart goes on to suggest that unlike crossmedia projects of the past, in which IP crosses the media divide for purely product line diversification (merchandising), “true” transmedia is designed in preproduction with the intent of immersion rather than simply rehashing IP in post for maximum ROI.^[5]