Games became part of transmedia storytelling through the convergence of interactive media, expanding franchises and audience participation—not through one invention or a single starting date. Their distinctive contribution is play: players can explore a world, act within its rules and sometimes shape what happens. But putting the same characters or logo in a game, film and book does not automatically make a transmedia story.
How did games become part of transmedia storytelling?
The history is best understood as the overlap of three developments. Games grew into a medium with its own forms of interaction and player agency. Companies built franchises by carrying recognizable worlds across media. And audiences moved among those works, bringing their interpretations, play and fan practices with them.
These developments reinforced one another. A franchise could invite audiences into a familiar world through different kinds of experiences; games could make exploration and action part of that experience; and audience interest could extend beyond any single installment. This history has no single inventor or agreed start date.
The 2018 academic collection Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, edited by Dan Hassler-Forest and Sean M. Guynes, examines games alongside novels, comics, television, advertising, fandom and franchise models. Its approach connects the cultural work of building a shared storyworld with the industrial logic of extending a franchise across decades. Games belong to that wider media ecology, not merely to a category of merchandise.
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What is the difference between an adaptation and a transmedia extension?
An adaptation translates material into another medium. A film based on a game, for example, may retell or reinterpret that game’s story for cinema. A transmedia extension uses a new medium to add something to the wider world: a different viewpoint, a new episode or an experience that was not present in the original.
The distinction is useful, but real franchises often combine the two. A game can adapt an existing film and still add new material; a screen version can translate a game’s premise without expanding its storyworld. Scholarship also uses “transmedia” in more than one way, so the label alone does not tell you what a particular work does.
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A 2026 review titled “20 years of transmedia research: Definitions, methodologies, and fields of study” describes a field that has broadened beyond fiction and identifies gaps in what has been studied. That breadth is another reason to examine the work itself rather than assume that every cross-media release is transmedia storytelling.
What can a game add that a film or book cannot?
Games can make a storyworld something a player acts in, rather than only watches or reads. Their rules, choices and spaces can make exploration, decision-making and repeated practice central to the experience. Those qualities do not guarantee a deeper story, but they give creators different ways to present a world or invite an audience to engage with it.
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Games also move in both directions across media: they may adapt a book, comic or film, or a game-originated property may later move to the screen. Aleynikova and Lapina-Krasiuk’s 2024 study of Tomb Raider examines the franchise’s movement from gaming platforms to film between 1996 and 2013. It offers a case for studying how a property is translated across media; it does not, by itself, establish whether a particular adaptation succeeded commercially.
Can a game be someone’s first step into a franchise?
Yes. A game does not have to be a later tie-in: it can be an audience member’s entry point into a world that also exists in other media. Victoria Lagrange’s 2024 study of reception of Bill Willingham’s Fables franchise surveyed 58 participants. Most said they first encountered the franchise through its comics, while a significant number entered through the video game. Many participants had explored multiple parts of the franchise and wanted further narrative exploration.
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Those findings describe this small, specific survey, not players or franchises generally. They are useful as an illustration of how audiences can arrive through different installments and then move among them—not as evidence that games are the usual entry point.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Who shapes a shared world beyond its official stories?
World-building can happen through play and community practice, not only through material planned by a rights-holder. In a 2024 study of Dungeons & Dragons play cultures in Singapore, Kellynn Wee describes players using transmedia techniques to sustain a shared imagined world. Wee calls one aspect of this practice “soft canon”: participants can value the emotional resonance of a detail without needing every player to agree on exactly what happened.
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This account makes room for a kind of world-building that is social and negotiated rather than fixed entirely by official continuity. Its setting matters: the study concerns particular Singaporean communities, not all tabletop role-playing or fan practice.
How can you tell meaningful world-building from a brand extension?
A new release may share characters or a logo with a franchise without adding much to its storyworld. To assess what a game or other installment contributes, ask:
- Narrative function: Does it retell an existing story, add an episode, offer a parallel viewpoint, or mainly extend the brand?
- Medium-specific contribution: What do play, rules, choice, exploration or social activity make possible in this version?
- Continuity authority: Who decides what counts as canon? Do player- or fan-created contributions have official standing, or matter chiefly within a community?
- Audience pathway: Which installments can introduce newcomers, and what might encourage them to seek out others?
- Industrial structure: How do rights and franchise strategy enable or constrain expansion across media?
These questions draw attention to storytelling, audience practice and production together. They are a way to compare works, not a universal scoring system.
Where might games and transmedia go next?
The direction is open. The World Intellectual Property Organization’s overview of the video game industry identifies hardware and software innovation, digital transformation, business models, intellectual property and player experience as important dimensions of industry change. Each can affect how games are made, distributed and connected to other media, but none predicts a single outcome.
Transmedia scholarship is also broadening, while the 2026 review identifies gaps in themes and methods. That supports further study, not a confident forecast of which franchise, platform or business model will dominate. The clearest way to think about the future is as a set of questions: what new forms of play will technology enable, how will business and rights arrangements shape them, and how will audiences participate in the worlds that emerge?
Quick Recap
Further reading
- Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, edited by Dan Hassler-Forest and Sean M. Guynes (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), is a peer-reviewed collection on games, novels, comics, television, advertising, production, economics and fandom. It is an academic history, rather than a practical production manual.
- Victoria Lagrange, “Understanding Transmedia Storytelling: Reception and Narrative Comprehension in Bill Willingham’s Fables Franchise,” Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding (ACL, 2024), pp. 32–36.
- Kellynn Wee, “If it’s held dear, it’ll get pushed through”: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (2024).
- Aleynikova and Lapina-Krasiuk, “From Gaming Platforms to the Big Screen: The Transmediation of the Tomb Raider Franchise (1996–2013),” Communications. Media. Design 9(4), published December 30, 2024.
- World Intellectual Property Organization, Innovation and Intellectual Property Use in the Global Video Game Industry.
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