![]() This will be exemplified by a closer comparative look at the adventure game The Walking Dead: The Game (Telltale Games, 2012) and The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (Terminal Reality, 2013). Usually overlooked in other analyses, we argue that these formal and aesthetical characteristics, such as the interactive nature of video games, call for a broader approach that transcends the accustomed search of common narrative aspects. Through the analysis of different examples, with special emphasis on the particular case of The Walking Dead, and drawing primarily from Henry Jenkins’s concept of “transmedia storytelling” and Jens Schröter’s concept of intermediality, this paper aims to show how different media aesthetics contribute to the process of storytelling and enrich the experience of the consumer. In doing so, aspects of self-identity, such as race, can inform (anti)fan positions through intersectional politics.Īs transmedia franchises increasingly populate our cultural environment, many questions arise about the effect of the different media involved in the depiction of storyworlds. Therefore, Black audiences may read The Walking Dead as both racially reductive and radical. Comparatively, The Walking Dead video game (TellTale Games, 2012) offers character development for its Black male lead character that fans praise against wider cultural representations in relation to both the franchise's hyperdiegesis and to video games in general. Thus, Black antifan rhetoric aimed at the spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead (2015–) centers on the zombification of Black men, a metaphor of the mistreatment and othering of young Black men by US police. Moreover, The Walking Dead is a successful transmedia franchise, and thus racial discourse shifts and changes, depending on which transmedia texts are being consumed. An analysis of African Americans' responses to marginalized Black male characters politicizes the racial milieu of the series against the backdrop of wider racial relationships in the United States. This brand, which appears in comic books, novels, TV series, Web episodes and video games, is analysable not only as an exemplary case of transmedia storytelling, where every ramification of the franchise published in different media is both autonomous and synergistic with the others, but also by focusing on the choice excitement of users in the first season of the video game The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series.ĭespite axiomatic industry and academic discourses of The Walking Dead's (2010–) status as quality TV-linked to its graphic visuals and compelling story lines-strong counterclaims question the text's (mis)representations of race and its propensity for systematically killing off Black male characters. This essay will discuss a specific video game, based on the famous franchise of The Walking Dead. ![]() Consequently, a narrative universe that wants to emphasize choice excitement and the active role of people can focus on video games, where the interactive approach is prominent. " In this, every choice of the user should have a consequence in the fictional universe of a specific franchise. One of the most important features in a transmedia structure, as Max Giovagnoli argues in his book Transmedia: Storytelling e Comunicazione, is the development of the user's decision-making power, defined by the author as " choice excitement.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |