Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making. It was originally contracted back in 2017 and promised to focus on ‘emergent transmedia’, exploring all those developing and often indie practices of transmedia storytelling that started to materialise around that time. Genre was a core part of this thinking, as it became clear that, even as transmediality was evolving into a whole multiplicity of meanings, practices, applications and understandings, the concept of genre was central to how stories spread across multiple media. Even if few talked about it.
Time went on, our lives went in new directions, and new challenges presented themselves. (If nothing else, Freeman became a father—twice!). Thankfully, Smith joined the project in 2018, bringing a fresh perspective that dovetailed perfectly with Freeman’s interest in looking at how the technological and participatory affordances of transmedia entertainments relate to contemporary workings of genre. And it was Smith who really consolidated the vision for the project as something even more ambitious: put simply, this book seeks to understand genre as it works today, theorising a new model for genre in the age of media convergence. This marks a contribution that we are both very proud of, and one that we hope was worth the wait.
Of course, we need to thank and appreciate those people who helped us along the way. As ever, Freeman would like to offer a genuine thanks to Carley, whose love remains utterly unwavering. He also offers a big thanks to his dad for his continued support, especially during a diffcult period in his own life, and to Beth Wakefeld for her friendship. Smith would like to thank Zoë, Lucinda and Aimee for their love, support and good humour throughout the writing of this book. Finally, we both want to thank the editors at Palgrave, who have been nothing but patient and understanding since the very beginning of this project.
Introduction or: Why We Still Need Genre
Imagine you are searching through the interface of Netfix, as we assume you must have done at some point or another. You are browsing its catalogue of seemingly unending content. As you do so, it quickly becomes apparent that Netfix’s entire navigation principle is based on coded sets of tags—otherwise known as genres. Some basic online research reveals that, as of 2021, Netfix has over 27,000 genres listed on its platform (Lilly 2021), which does not even include its so-called hidden genre codes (Spencer 2018). So, two observations immediately come to mind when browsing Netfix in this way. The frst is that Netfix’s approach to ‘tagging’ content under particular genre categories is not in any way bound by medium, production context, country of origin, year of release and so on. Its entire approach to genre is instead something much wider, broader and more diverse than many studies of flm or literary genre have considered previously. A quick search for ‘thriller’, for example, brings up everything from Netfix Original Before I Wake (2016) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), both mixed in with television series The Alienist (2018). And the second observation is that by mixing flm and television from many eras and production contexts, Netfix’s genre tags function as the platform’s marketing mechanism, grouping titles together so as to engage certain demographics. Genre, recalibrated for Netfix, creates personalisation out of chaos. Netfix’s use of genre tags may be commonplace and even fairly obvious to describe, but it demonstrates a very important point: that genre, while working differently when viewed from either industrial, technological or participatory perspectives, remains the bedrock of today’s transmedia landscape. So says Alison Norrington, Creative Director at StoryCentral Ltd., a transmedia consultancy frm that works globally with clients including the likes of Walt Disney Imagineering, SundanceTV, AMC Networks and FOX International: ‘In this messy, fragmented media landscape, where content is everywhere and so too are our audiences, genre is perhaps the only remaining constant’ (2020). Which is all in spite of the fact that genre, at least in academic circles, has largely fallen
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away in recent decades, precisely at a time when academics need it the most. We are all part of a media convergence age where the meaning-making power of genre is both more important and less stable than it was before, with audiences increasingly fragmented across an ever-diversifying set of platforms and channels. Yet operating complexly within such fragmentation, today’s genres— often formed via a set of interconnected, hyperlinked digital platforms that afford highly individualised perspectives on media—are being shaped and reshaped almost continuously by these different platforms and channels. Each of these genres is thus in constant dialogue and re-negotiation with one another as a result of the extensive transmedia experiences that surround them. And yet as Norrington declared, with digital platforms characterised by their expansive, fragmentary nature, genre is indeed crucial to how we navigate and make sense of today’s media landscape, even if the processes underpinning this are not fully understood.
Which brings us to this book’s frst—and main—overarching objective. Genres are perhaps the most innately transmedial of media constructs, formed as they are from all kinds of industrial, cultural, technological, textual and discursive phenomena. Yet very few have attempted to analyse explicitly how genre works in a transmedia context. This book aims to do precisely that, to make a deliberately transmedial contribution to the study of genre in the age of media convergence. Media industries and their various technologies, practices and systems of operation have become more aligned and networked in recent decades, providing a clear model for extending entertainment across multiple media. As Jenkins writes, media convergence—emerging as a concept around the start of the Internet era in the early 1990s—describes ‘the fow of content across multiple media, … the co-operation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of audiences’ (2006: 2), which makes ‘the fow of content across media inevitable’ (Jenkins 2003). This book considers the implications of this inevitability for genre, looking across different kinds of convergences, in turn expanding the critical toolkit via which genre can be analysed by developing a new conceptual model.
But let’s back up for a moment. Convergence is really only an umbrella term for making sense of the proliferation of interconnected screens that dominate our contemporary media culture, and refers most broadly to convergences at the level of technology, industry and culture. Industrial convergence describes a ‘synergy amongst media companies and industries’ (Hay and Couldry 2011: 473), and primarily describes corporate convergences within global media conglomerates, like Disney. Technological convergence, meanwhile, refers to the ‘hybridity that has folded the uses of separate media into one another’ (2011: 493), principally through digitisation. In turn, both of these forms of convergence have an impact at the level of culture and audiences, most notably by enhancing the ‘participatory capabilities of [media texts] and allowing the audience to infuence the fnal result’ (Karlsen 2018: 26). Most famously theorised as ‘participatory culture’ by Henry Jenkins (1992), these participatory capabilities often play out as ‘experience-centered, technologically augmented
conversations, a sharing between storytellers and audiences, between audiences and other audiences, and between online and offine worlds’ (Freeman and Gambarato 2018: 8).
But why are we recounting these oft-cited defnitions of media convergence here? It is important to begin with such a clear recounting of these terms, since they underpin precisely why we need a new conceptual framework for analysing genre. According to Rick Altman, whose seminal work on flm genre—that is, Film/Genre (1999)—lays much of the grounding for this book (as well as inspiring its title), a problem with many of the genre theorists of the past is their tendency to ‘evince no need to justify their positions’ or to ‘explain why a change in direction is necessary’ (1999: 1). We will not make this same mistake. The need for a new direction stems in part from the vocabulary—and the perception—that has greeted much of today’s convergent media. The likes of flms, television series and video games all exist across multiple streams of often portable media and devices, but a notable outcome of convergence culture is that media now has the tendency to be reduced to the standardising and arguably reductive term ‘content’. Christopher Nolan, perhaps Hollywood’s leading purveyor of blockbuster smarts, discussed this point in interview: ‘It’s a term that pretends to elevate the creative, but actually trivialises differences of form that have been important to creators and audiences alike’ (Reynolds 2014). As Nolan further explains: ‘Content can be ported across phones, watches, gas-station pumps or any other screen, and the idea would be that movie theatres should acknowledge their place as just another of these “platforms”, albeit with bigger screens and cup-holders’ (ibid.).
It is precisely within this context of standardised (trans)media content where media now circulates or where ‘media content fows fuidly’ (Jenkins 2006: 332) that a question arises over the renewed and seemingly paradoxical role of genre amidst such content-porting—in particular, the workings of genre conventions and its expectations. Genre has long been studied in terms of its categorising potential and its ability to shape how media is understood, but what about the genre dimensions of transmediality, and its use of multiple media to tell stories? Put simply, how does genre open up distinctive strategies for today’s transmedia landscape, and how do transmedial sites change how genre is understood and constructed?
Which brings us to the book’s second overarching objective: the creative industries are at the forefront of shaping how a range of emerging digital media technologies, platforms and services are now being used to connect audiences to content. The worlds of innovation and research and development (R&D) now focus on emerging trends such as immersive technologies, artifcial intelligence (AI), online streaming and new forms of podcasting, to name just a few examples—each of which affords unique opportunities to tell stories. Though these emerging technologies, platforms and services have certainly not escaped the clutches of academics, little attention has been paid thus far to what the industrial, technological and participatory transformations of such innovative new platforms mean to ideas of genre.
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In responding to this objective, and in setting the stage for the revival of genre theory in contemporary transmedia scholarship, this book interrogates the form and function of genre across a range of media convergence sites, spanning franchises, streaming platforms, catch-up services, immersive technologies, AI, social media and beyond. We show how the conceptual possibilities of genre are reconfgured through their adaptation to emerging technologies and cultural practices across media. In that sense, we might be seen to be picking up where Janet Murray left off, whose seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck (1999) explored how computer-based interactive narratives might operate in relation to a range of popular genres. As well as discussing science fction and fantasy forms (both of which will be returned to in our book), Murray also identifed more realist forms of drama including soap opera as ripe for enhancement and expansion by then-cutting-edge digital techniques. In many ways the techniques Murray discussed over 20 years ago can be said to have anticipated some of the increasingly ubiquitous approaches adopted by today’s contemporary transmedia producers. For example, Murray looked at how in a television series like ER—a US medical drama that ran from 1994 to 2009—the specifc fctional locations frequently seen in the series could be presented virtually for participants to explore, and could thus be used to expand existing storylines or preview forthcoming storylines, or provide more background on characters (Murray 1999: 255–256).
Building on Murray’s semi-prophetic consideration of production, technology and participation, we will also analyse three sites of generic construction suitable for today’s age of media convergence: frst, industry, where transmedia genres are cultivated and managed; second, technology, through which transmedia genres are communicated and mediated; and, three, audience, where transmedia genres are co-created via participatory means. The frst site allows us to consider the contextual infuence of industrial convergence, that is, practices of conglomeration and licencing arrangements, on cross-platform manifestations of genre. The second site incorporates not only technological specifcities of, say, Netfix, Twitter, BBC iPlayer, virtual reality and so on but also cultural codes and conventions of these platforms and technologies. The fnal site stresses the role of audiences, individual users, players and watchers on constructing (or reconstructing) genre themselves, acting out and reacting to genre cues whenever they, say, post on social media, engage in a deepfake marketing app and so on. Importantly, across all three sites of media convergence, genre is transformed.
Refecting themes of connectedness and hybridity that characterise the feld of transmedia studies, this book is therefore about interrogating the generic mutations (Turner 2015) that must inevitably occur as part of sprawling transmedia experiences. As Glen Creeber once put it, ‘put crudely, genre simply allows us to organise a good deal of material into small categories’ (2015: 1). The problem, however, is that we now live in a transmedia age that is most commonly understood in terms of its interconnectedness and participatory processes across multiple platforms and channels, bringing with it heightened
accessibility, sharing, co-creation and—as per our Netfix example at the beginning of this introduction—personalisation. The idea of returning to ‘categories’ may feel decidedly at odds with this intrinsically personalised nature of what media is said to be in the twenty-frst century—sprawling, breaking free of its borders—but that is precisely why we need to return to genre studies. If genre is essentially ‘a system of organising the world’ (Creeber, 2015: 1), then this book looks at genre as it works today.
A Brief History of Genre studies
Genre theory spans not only decades but centuries, with a history reaching as far back as Ancient Greece. Importantly, across time, genre has been fundamental to categorising culture, but those categorisations and meanings have continued to shift upon changes in culture and society. It is time, then, for understandings of genre to change once more, and for genre studies to catch up with the digitally connected transmedia landscape of today. But before we can make sense of how genre works today, we must frst return to the question of genre itself.
Genre, as a theoretical concept and method of analysing a large variety of flm and television productions, has been highly infuential in these felds since the early 1980s. Central to the study of genre, particularly in flm studies, is the work of Rick Altman (1999), who set out what he described as a semantic versus syntactic approach to flm genre, before later considering pragmatic elements of institutions and audiences. In general, Altman claimed, a genre depends frst and foremost on the combination of: semantic properties, which are the textual characteristics that serve as the thematic building blocks of a genre (e.g. nineteenth-century America’s Far West settings in Westerns); and syntactic properties, which relate to the patterns by which the semantic elements are structured and formally represented—and the meanings that might be interpreted from this (e.g. the representation in Westerns of the American frontier as a border separating civilisation from barbarism and chaos) (Altman 1999: 218–220). Furthermore, Altman’s understanding of genre is based on the cumulative effect determined by the replication of textual modes—narrative, thematic and iconographic—and the surrounding discourses that contribute to genre formation. Our book will both build on and rethink Altman’s assumptions, making the case that while semantic, syntactic and discursive properties of genre are all absolutely at work in the transmedia environment, today’s industrial, technological and participatory affordances have the potential to transform these properties in new and uncharted ways.
Which is ftting, since for Altman, ‘the debate over genre has consistently taken place in slow motion’, with ‘decades—or even centuries—separate[ing] major genre theory statements’ (1999: 1). That said, much of the debate concerning genre has tended to revolve around the balance between genre as a textual or material construct, and one that is socially or culturally discursive. A genre, James Naremore argued (1995: 14), ‘has less to do with a group of
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artefacts than with a discourse—a loose evolving system of arguments and readings, helping to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies’. Altman (1999) further notes: ‘Genre is not your average descriptive term, but a complex concept with multiple meanings’, while Steve Neale (1999) emphasises how ‘in the public sphere, the institutional discourses are of central importance’, arguing for a more ‘multi-directional’ approach to analyses of genre. Christine Cornea, too, points out that ‘while early genre critics liked to see genres as more or less fxed (if not by their academic theorising, then by the industry), this has been challenged by discrepancies in genre defnition that occur in the way a flm is categorised at different times’ (2010: 8). Our book will build on these ideas by showcasing the ways in which genre itself can provide new insights into the production, distribution, marketing and reception of cross-platform entertainments by adopting a transmedial lens.
In some ways, adopting a transmedial lens through which to analyse genre is a very natural development of what genre studies has been doing for a very long time, albeit less explicitly and more discursively. For instance, following the seminal work of Altman, Jason Mittell explored the ‘extra-textual’ ways in which genres are culturally operated (2004). By shifting the focus away from analyses that attempt to provide the defnition of a genre, Mittell looked towards new ways in which genre interpretations and evaluations operate as part of the larger cultural workings of genre. For example, instead of asking questions such as ‘What do police dramas mean?’ or ‘How do we defne quiz shows?’, Mittell’s cultural approach (also see Mittell 2001) led to new kinds of critical questions being posed, such as ‘What do talk shows mean for a specifc community?’ or ‘How is the defnition of animation articulated by sociallysituated groups?’ (2004: 14).
Importantly, as Mittell clarifes, ‘such an approach demands cultural specifcity, recognising that a genre might have various categorical boundaries and meanings in different cultures’ (2008: 12). Mittell’s point is that the cultural meanings, industrial practices and consumer expectations of a given genre are likely to change if examined transnationally, pointing to how the cartoon genre was perceived as ‘a low-value, highly commercialised kids-only genre’ in the US compared to its ‘legitimate role as a site of social commentary and artistic innovation’ in Japan (2008: 12). Genres shift transnationally according to cultural specifcity, then, but how do they evolve transmedially according to medium-specifc cultural practices? In other words, if culturally specifc discourses contribute—through defning, interpreting, evaluating—to the formation of a genre, then we need to track the variability of genre-forming discourses across media. Indeed, it is worth clarifying that our book aims to focus on how genres adapt to the variable cultures of a contemporary transmedial setting. Therefore, while we recognise that traditional media texts, such as flms and television programmes, contribute to genre formation, ours is largely a ‘cultural approach’ to genre analysis (Mittell 2004). This book, therefore, does not adopt a strictly defnitional approach to genre, whereby genres are chiefy understood, and taxonomically classifed, in formal and aesthetic terms,
as is typical of more traditional genre theory. Neither are we concerned with a more interpretive approach to genre whereby, what Fredric Jameson described as, ‘the ideological basis for genre’ is explored (1975: 136). Via such an approach, genres are interpreted as refecting broad societal structures and tensions; Sara Humphrey’s study of how video games activating the Western and flm noir genres reinforce retrograde ideologies related to race and gender is a recent example of such an approach (2021). However, rather than broadly interpret what a genre might mean, we should, as Mittell argues, consider instead ‘what genre means for specifc groups in a particular cultural instance [emphasis in orig.]’ (2004: 5). Accordingly, in line with a cultural approach to how genre operates transmedially, we examine how genre is culturally constructed, by industries and audiences, in particular instances across platforms and technologies as part of transmedia practices.
Furthermore, via this cultural approach, we pay particular attention to paratextual infuences on genre formation. Writing about the role of book covers in how readers engage with literary novels, Gerard Genette (2001) approached genre as the work done by an author or publisher to write text that accompanies a book. Genette calls this statement of genre ‘the genre indication’ (ibid.). For Genette, genre is part of a paratext insofar as it is stated in the material authorised as part of the publication or distribution of the book (ibid.). Years later, building on these ideas, Jonathan Gray’s concept of the paratext refers to those media items that sit in-between products and alongside products, between ownership and cultural formation, between content and promotional material. For Gray (2010), the meaning of contemporary media stories is no longer located solely within the main texts themselves (e.g. in flms, television episodes), as it also extends across multiple platforms such as online materials, promotional additions and toys. These kinds of media paratexts can aid the audience’s ‘speculative consumption’ of a story as ‘entryway paratexts’ and in turn extend the storyworld by providing new narrative content (Gray 2010: 25). Moreover, ‘genre is part of this in that if you have experience with a particular genre, for example Dollhouse and sci-f, you go into watching the show with different expectations than someone who has no experience with science fction’ (Gray 2010: 112). Paratexts, Gray would argue, are texts that control how we see and interpret the main text. In terms of genre, they are frequently the vehicles for what Mittell identifes as ‘the culturally circulating practices that categorise texts’ (2004: 13). Furthermore, paratexts are, in effect, transmedial by nature and by defnition, thus they serve as a useful concept for thinking about both the textual and discursive nature of genre across media.
Echoing both Mittell’s calls for a cultural specifcity approach to analysing genre, and Genette’s and Gray’s approach to factoring in paratextual infuences on genres, Sue Harper notes that ‘even fve years in cultural history is a very long time, and generic shifts can take place at breakneck speed’ (2017). By way of example, Harper points to the thriller genre:
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In the post-war period in British cinema, flms such as Odd Man Out and Mine Own Executioner shared a visual rhetoric and view of trauma. The genre was pretty homogenous as a whole during the period from 1945 to 1950. But right through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, the thriller genre became bewilderingly diverse: it could be bifurcated between black and mild, between fascinated and repelled, between liberal and repressive. It is possible to argue that the multiplicity of the genre is due to the unease in the period about transgression and taboo. The thriller genre could be seen in this period as responding, in an indirect manner, to the lack of consensus about the outsider in society. In the 1970s, with flms such as Gumshoe, the thriller genre became a site of irony and disavowal. (2017)
Harper’s point is valid, and in a study of genre across a diverse number of media it is important to narrow down the focus of this book to a particular period of time and to defne each genre according to its manifestations today. Suffce to say, this book is deliberately contemporary, examining case studies produced during the last decade—specifcally, between circa 2014 and 2022. Another way of conceptualising the importance of textual and cultural infuences on genre is the work of Anne Friedman, who used the metaphor of the ‘ceremony’ to explain this dynamic between the ‘material and situational dimensions of genre’, writing:
Any performance of a text takes place within a broader ceremonial frame, and involves all the constituents of the occasion: the audience, the actions of opening and concluding the performance, talk about the performance, and its demarcation from other performances. (1986: 88)
Friedman elaborates: ‘Such things as reading a book, attending and giving lectures, dinner conversations, flling in forms and interviews are all ceremonial frames’ (1986: 88). Now, a question: what happens to the material codes of genre if its situational frame is continually in fux given the different affordances of multiple media platforms all being used to tell different parts of a story? To extend Friedman’s metaphor to today’s transmedia landscape, then, we might say that genre now operates within and across multiple proverbial ceremonies, with each ceremony feeding into, overlapping and even distorting the others. In other words, understanding genre in a transmedial context means taking a medium-specifc approach to transmediality, looking at different genres across different platforms and technologies, and thus connecting a specifc generic characteristic to the nature of the platform being used.
Such an approach means conceiving of genre as what Harper calls ‘an industrial category’, as ‘an economically determined structure which exemplifes a neat match between audience pleasure and production proft’ (2017). This industrial consideration is indeed a key perspective of our book, building on studies that, observes Christine Cornea (2010: 8), concern themselves ‘with the ways in which the industry is able to use genre to maximise effciency of
production’ or studies that ‘look at how genre operates as a branding device or how it functions in association with audience expectations’.
These kinds of industrial perspectives are useful in the age of media convergence, as a notable problem with previous genre theory is that much of this work does not theorise genre as a media-spanning system. As noted earlier, though genre has been a preoccupation of scholars for a long time, it tends to be specifc to one medium in any given study, limited to a single disciplinary perspective. For example, think of the seminal work on flm genre (Grant 1986; Altman 1999), television genre (Mittell 2004; Creeber, 2015) or literary genre (Rosen 2001). The same criticism can also be made of the countless books on particular genres within a given medium, such as the quiz show (Holmes, 2008), the fantastic (Todorov and Howard 1975), the crime drama (Turnbull 2014), the Western (Rollins and O’Connor 2009), the sitcom (Mills 2009), the teen movie (Driscoll 2011) and so on. In spite of the absence of transmedial dynamics in much of existing work on genre, said work is still crucial to underpinning many of the conceptual categories that will be developed in this book to establish a new model for understanding and analysing genre transmedially.
A MultiplAtforM ApproAcH to Genre
That being said, this tendency to theorise genre through a single medium does arguably explain why genre theory has struggled in recent years to adapt to today’s digitally connected, hybridised and hyperlinked transmedia culture. Few studies have explored the realm of transmediality in terms of genre, despite the former emerging as perhaps the most well-theorised component of media convergence and the latter having been a preoccupation of scholars for a very long time, as we have seen. Critical debates around the idea of genre as a transmedial construct tend to consist of occasional asides and consideration. Colin Harvey’s Fantastic Transmedia book (2015) delves into concepts of memory and play in relation to science fction and fantasy cases of transmedia storyworlds. But despite opting to focus on the likes of the Hulk, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harvey still engages with ‘a broad defnition of transmedia storytelling’ (2015: 1), rather than thinking about how multiplatform contexts infuence fantasy and science fction genres to adapt and reformulate. Notably, our book does specifcally explore how transmedia practices reshape sci-f and fantasy genres, as well as adjacent story types concerned with the fantastic, such as horror and superhero genres. Furthermore, a key contribution of our book is that it approaches transmedia entertainments far beyond just science fction and fantasy scenarios.
The question of how both fantastic and non-fantastic genres play out in practice across multiple media platforms will be explored throughout the pages of this book, but for now allow us to hint at some of the conceptual considerations that enable us to understand the relationships between transmediality and genre. As noted above, any given genre is based in part on well-defned
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textual components (both semantic and syntactic). And in a textual sense, we can say that a genre exists when those recognised components come back and repeat themselves. Thus, one could say that the establishing of the horror genre coincides with Frankenstein (1931), the second horror flm after Dracula (1931), while the consolidation by virtue of imitation would happen with The Mummy (1932), even if a crucial role, from this perspective that focuses on repetition, is played by the abundant set of sequels of those frst horror flms. Genre thus concerns the repetition of formulaic qualities that are easily identifable and consequently marketable due to familiarity. As Linda Ruth Williams notes, there is an interplay between generic conventions and the audience that functions as a ‘social currency’ (2005: 18). Vivian C. Sobchack also claims that ‘there is a pattern these movies follow, and the pleasure we get from them is the pleasure of re-experiencing the familiar’ (1974: 59). Conceptually speaking, then, transmediality has an awful lot in common with genre. Barry Keith Grant famously theorised genre as the production of variation on sameness, noting that ‘stated simple, genre movies are those commercial feature flms which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations’ (2003: xiv). Similarly, Freeman has discussed the importance of conceptualising transmediality as a system of building variation on sameness:
Insofar as it works to extend existing stories and expand established fctional worlds, transmedia storytelling is on the one hand about sameness—since all of the various stories in a given story world are somehow required to ‘feel like they ft with the others’, as Jenkins puts it (2006: 335), as parts of the same fctional storyworld. But on the other hand transmedia storytelling is simultaneously about variation—since each of the various stories in a given storyworld must also expand that same storyworld, telling different events about that world. (Freeman 2016: 8)
In the simplest and narrowest sense, transmediality and genre might appear to be opposites of each other, with the former seemingly about expansion across borders and the latter about categorisation within borders. But as we have learnt, genre is both a textual and a paratextual construction—both a system (or systematic) series of markers, cues, conventions and structures that make up the textual fabric of texts and a far more discursive, industrially produced, market-oriented set of cues around a text that signals its mode of classifcation to an audience. And this amalgamation of text and paratext echoes Freeman’s own defnition of transmediality as ‘both an expansive form of intertextuality and intertextuality that builds textual connections between stories while allowing stories to escape their textual borders and exist in between them as well as across them, folding paratext into text’ (2016: 190).
Looking forward, it is therefore key to follow in the footsteps of the ‘extratextual’ approach to genre analysis argued by Jason Mittell (2004), as well as the ‘multi-dimensional’ approach suggested by Steve Neale (1999), whereby
genre ‘encompasses systems of expectations, categories, labels and names, discourses, texts and groups or corpuses of texts, and the conventions that govern them all’ (1999: 2). As such, we ourselves will analyse three sites of generic construction suitable for today’s digital and multiplatform culture: one, industry, through which transmedia genres are created and managed; two, platform, through which transmedia genres are communicated and mediated via technology; and, three, audience, through which transmedia genres are co-created via participatory and performative means. This latter site, in particular, stresses the importance of audiences constructing genre themselves within today’s multiplatform environment, essentially acting out genre when posting on social media, playing VR games and so on. What is key to stress, however, is that across all three of these sites, genre is transformed, evolving in line with the user experience that is being constructed across and between the borders of multiple media platforms.
Many of the aforementioned conceptions of genre will be returned to throughout this book, re-applied, re-contextualised and re-imagined for the age of multiplatform media. And as we have established, taking a mediatraversing approach to making sense of genre in the twenty-frst century broadly means taking into account (and also triangulating) three contextual factors of industrial, technological and participatory convergence. But what does this mean in practice? Put simply, what is the research method for taking a multiplatform approach to analysing genre? We will now lay out the methodological approach taken in this book, an approach which means folding in analyses of media industry practices, promotional paratexts, textual and brand analysis, online ethnography and wider audience research.
Methodologically, approaching transmedia practices as the building of personalised experiences via technology—studying both ‘the techno-social development of digital media and the sociocultural development of fan studies’ (Booth 2018: 61)—will provide a useful starting point for making sense of genre in today’s transmedia culture, one that emphasises relationships between what Booth calls ‘interactive elements’ and ‘the infuence of fans’ in the process of reconstructing and renegotiating genre across media (Booth 2018: 67).
Hills (2018: 224), too, has called for the ‘need to consider transmedia not just as storytelling but also as a kind of experience’, noting: ‘Given that transmedia extensions occur within a proliferating, ubiquitous screen culture, the issue of transmedia’s locatedness in space and place has generally been underexplored’ (2018: 224). While Hills is referring specifcally to set tours and walkthrough experiences, our own multiplatform approach to genre is not only about the idea of ‘being there’ (Hills 2017: 245). More than this, our work puts genre right at the heart of the multifaceted, multi-perspectival systems through which the use of multiple media across diverse screens, technologies and locations work together in different ways to engage audiences in a highly experiential and often personalised manner.
Studying the personalised transmedial workings of genre hints at the importance of returning, somewhat contradictorily perhaps, to a technology- or
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platform-specifc approach. After all, though it is perhaps the defning claim of Rick Altman’s seminal research into flm genre that genres have always spanned multiple media, Altman did not consider genre to be something that naturally extends itself across those multiple media. As Altman commented, ‘it cannot be taken for granted that flm genre is the same thing as literary genre’ (1999: 12). Explains Altman: ‘Even when a genre already exists in other media, the flm genre … cannot simply be borrowed for non-flm sources—it must be recreated’ (1999: 53). In his work, Altman always struck a careful balance between positioning genre as ‘an on-going process’ (1999: 54) that transitions from many different forms of media—literature to flm, for example—and as something that requires constant ‘realignment’ (1999: 43) according to the medium in which it is based. Where, then, does that leave our transmedial perspective, where creators construct new yet interconnecting tales by crossing multiple media platforms and by telling those new tales on each of those media? Are we to assume, therefore, that as a story or entertainment franchise is told across multiple media platforms that its genre is actually being realigned and re-created from platform to platform as an on-going transmedial process?
Taking such an approach to genre means focusing not necessarily on individual media per se, but instead on converged sites of generic mutation and innovation, such as streaming services, social media platforms and deepfake technology, which each fuse and layer multiple screens and other forms of media on top of one another. Looking at these sites of convergence on a caseby-case basis will allow us to better understand the role that these specifc sites play in terms of genre-building in and across today’s transmedia landscape.
In turn, this approach to genre will also recalibrate our overall understanding of what transmediality actually is. And this is very important. As was stated at the beginning of this introduction, there is a danger that comes with describing the convergences of contemporary media—namely, that convergence often becomes directly synonymous with the outright blending of all forms of media into single, standardised forms of digital media content. For even amidst a time of apparent technological and industrial convergence, mobile media, connected viewing, immersive engagement and so on, it is still crucial to remember that the likes of streaming platforms, catch-up services, immersive technologies and social media channels all operate with largely specifc sets of affordances, practices, policies and consumption habits (Smith 2018). And so in order to fully understand the transmedial genre-building potentials of these emerging media platforms and technologies, we frst need to better understand what each of these platforms—as a specifc technology with distinct affordances, embedded within a wider industrial and participatory cultural context—can actually do. Looking, not at genre, but at the transmedia dispersal of another pan-media concept—that is, ideology, Dan Hassler-Forest notes the need to consider the role of medium specifcity in the creation of political messages across entertainment media franchises (2018: 299). As per Altman’s ideas about genre realignment, we similarly argue that the specifcities of particular
platforms, technologies, industrial practices and participatory cultures underpin the shaping of genre across media and must, therefore, be accounted for.
A formal but conceptual point about the approach of this book: Why the focus on what might be described as Anglo-American media industries, platforms and participatory contexts? In some ways, this focus goes against the grain of the most recent work in the feld of transmedia studies, which has ‘expanded from an early focus on popular genres to more diverse media (publishing, music, location-based experiences), from entertainment to documentary and journalism, activism and mobilization, education, religion, diplomacy, sports, and branding (see Freeman and Gambarato 2018). Indeed, Freeman and Proctor previously pushed for this feld ‘to fully interrogate transmedia cultures—in the plural—and to establish a cultural specifcity approach to transmediality’, which would provide far more ‘localized, cultural perspectives on transmediality’ (2018: 2). We are also aware of more recent research in genre studies, such as that by Costanzo (2014), Chung and Diffrient (2015) and Dibeltulo and Barrett (2018), which traces the impact of globalisation and transnationalism on issues of flm genre. The Dibeltulo and Barrett collection, in particular, demonstrates the need for genre studies to cast a transnational, cross-cultural and indeed more global outlook. In line with their approach, the book editors rightly observe the need to consider ‘generic transition across space, time, systems of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception’ (2018: 4). While we concur wholeheartedly with this outlook, it is also notable that this collection, and the other two projects noted above, narrow their focus to flm genre, and thus neglect to engage with the question of transmediality that justifes the need for our book. Moreover, we have chosen to focus on socalled popular genres of entertainment, but not to elicit any kind of general explanation about the workings of all transmedia genres everywhere. Rather, we focus on US and UK examples because it is necessary to frst analyse, theorise and fully understand a more overarching model of transmedia genre before one considers more localised, cross-cultural or national approaches to transmedia genre.
It is for this same reason that we do not delve into questions of sub-genre. The book is structured around ‘top-level’ genres, as it were, such as horror, comedy, science fction, fantasy and so on, although we are not claiming that any of our chosen case studies should be classifed exclusively as one genre over another. On the contrary, taking a multiplatform approach to genre means acknowledging the multitude of infuences and hybrid relationships at play at any one time. Instead, then, our approach is based on analysing genre activation—that is, attempting to understand the industrial infuences, technological augmentations and user engagement practices of a genre’s codes and conventions, however discursive. In other words, our approach is based on examining what it means to construct and reconstruct a genre from one platform to another. That said, we hope that this book inspires others to consider alternative approaches to transmedia genre, tackling the question of sub-genres.
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tHe structure of tHe Book
In terms of chapter structure, the remainder of the book is divided into ten chapters, organised into three parts. The frst part considers entertainment franchises and is rooted in analyses of media conglomerates, namely Disney and its sub-divisions Marvel and Lucasflm. The second part examines a range of digital platforms—Netfix, ITV Hub, BBC iPlayer, YouTube and Kickstarter— and considers how each of these platform’s industrial, technological and participatory properties work to (re)shape a particular genre as it fows, augments and mutates across multiple media. The third part, fnally, looks at emerging technologies, namely virtual reality and AI-driven deepfake apps. These sites may seem diverse (which they are), but they each represent particular industrial, technological and participatory transformations in the make-up of twentyfrst-century convergence culture. We therefore use each of our eight case-study chapters to exemplify different ways through which genre works in a transmedia context, identifying new conceptions specifc to a given genre that provide rich additions to genre studies. Each chapter will reveal and analyse a new conception of transmedia genre, such as ‘genre divergence’, ‘genre empowerment’ and ‘genre fctioning’, to name just three, before returning to these conceptions in the conclusion, where we will use them to lay out a new conceptual framework for analysing genre in the transmedia age.
Specifcally, Chaps. 2 and 3 consider the workings of media conglomeration and its impact on contemporary genre formation. Chapter 2 looks at Marvel and uses the character of Captain America to examine how today’s conglomerate media culture interacts with the cross-platform construction of the superhero genre. It reveals how, at Marvel, industrial conditions motivate instances of what we term genre divergence, as industry discourses and corporate techniques combine to manage genre contrasts and discrepancies within the Marvel franchise. This chapter also demonstrates how the actions of fan and journalistic practices contribute to the process of minimising genre divergence in Marvel’s fctional multiverse.
Chapter 3, which looks at another of Hollywood’s leading entertainment franchises, Star Wars, explores how the Disney-owned Lucasflm has formed franchise connections between Disney-produced products and the Star Wars of old, primarily through genre intertexts and the practice of what we term genre linking. Via an analysis that takes both a textual and cultural approach to the Western genre in relation to the Disney+ series The Mandalorian (2019–), this chapter identifes how genre develops associations between this series and with what is culturally perceived to be the core of the Star Wars franchise: the original Star Wars flm trilogy (1977–1983).
Chapter 4—the frst of four chapters that explore genre activation practices in relation to particular digital platforms—charts how the global streaming service Netfix has built its fagship series Stranger Things (2016–) into a series of referential, intertextual portals that channel how audiences respond to and participate with the genre of horror. By conceiving of transmedia genre as
emotional empowerment for the multiplatform audience, this chapter examines how a streaming service such as Netfix orchestrates not so much a horror entertainment across its digital platforms, but rather its reactional, emotional fallout.
Chapter 5 continues to explore the impact of digital platforms on twentyfrst-century manifestations of genre, but this time examines how the UK broadcaster ITV’s streaming platform, ITV Hub—along with its online marketing strategies and its digital spread across social media channels—transforms the genre of docudrama into a mode of engagement specifc to today’s multiplatform culture. Looking at ITV’s high-end docudrama Quiz (2020), this chapter argues that the docudrama genre has evolved into an aesthetic, discursive and interactive engagement strategy that works to scaffold today’s digital infrastructures of catch-up TV, namely heightened customisation and democratic voice.
Chapter 6 looks at BBC Three sitcom Pls Like (2017–) and considers how its dissemination across multiple online platforms including YouTube relates to the widespread contemporary practice of transmedia distribution. This chapter demonstrates how emergent transmedia distribution practices can inform new approaches to the comedy genre. In particular, we consider how uses of genre can, in the creation of online programming, suit the cultural specifcities of multiple digital platforms as part of a transmedia distribution rollout.
Chapter 7 explores the world of digital crowdfunding, analysing how genre is constructed on the online platform Kickstarter as part of campaigns designed to secure media project funding. Using the Kickstarter campaign content for the Eiyuden Chronicle video game project as a case study, the chapter examines how this paratextual material establishes the fantasy Japanese role-playing game (or JRPG) genre in line with the affordances and conventions of the Kickstarter platform.
Chapter 8—the frst of two chapters that aim to consider the impact of emerging technologies on transmedia genre practice—examines virtual reality and explores how this emerging medium shapes (and reshapes) the war genre. We use this chapter to analyse how an innovative VR experience produced about the bombing of Hiroshima, The Day the World Changed (2018), evolves the war genre into an altogether more panoramic experience, lending a liminal, God-like perspective over the otherwise grounded stories of war.
Chapter 9, fnally, analyses the emerging trend of using deepfake apps as part of transmedia marketing, which we contextualise via research into artifcial intelligence. Using the flm Reminiscence (2021) and its accompanying deepfake app as a case study, this chapter considers what deepfake technology means to our understanding of science fction. We argue that the emergence of deepfakes—and AI more generally—has obliterated the former divide between ‘science’ and ‘fction’, fully amalgamating the tensions at the heart of this genre.
We should note that these particular pairings are not mutually exclusive. Netfix creates any number of genres, not just horror, while the affordances of the ITV Hub impact many different genres beyond the docudrama. The genres
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examined across this book are likely to be determined differently depending on the technological-industrial-participatory context. In other words, a docudrama constructed and extended via the ITV Hub is not necessarily the same kind of docudrama that might be constructed and evoked via Netfix. Nevertheless, while all chapters demonstrate our model of how genre works transmedially, the pairings identifed in each chapter also work to highlight key practices or concepts of transmedia genre. Each pairing exemplifes the relationships between particular affordances of media convergence and specifc strategies for constructing genre across multiple media that those affordances engender. Importantly, then, while each chapter considers a different site of media convergence, spanning various creative industries such as flm, television, immersive and video games, altogether the book’s eight chapters work as a whole to establish what we consider to be a new conceptual framework for understanding genre across media. The conclusion chapter will outline this model, pulling together the themes from the previous chapters to consider new meanings of genre across media. For as Cornea (2010: 6) once said, ‘if anything immediately creates a conceptual frame for meaning … it is the notion of genre’.
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