Presentation on "The Wolf Among Us" as a multimodal narrative

To Cry Wolf in the Digital Age

Transmedial Narrative in Bill Willingham's Fables and Telltale Games' The Wolf

Among Us

Fakultät Sprach- Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Fabian Gregori, BA

I: Transmediation and Transmedial Intertaxtuality

II: Remediation and Conversion

III: Transmedial Narrative in Fables

IV: Transmedial Narrative in The Wolf Among Us

I: Transmediation and Transmedial Intertextuality

-> Literature:

concept above everything that is narrative

-> Transmediation (Vandermeersche 2014):

process of narratives traveling from one medium to another

-> Transmedial Intertextuality:

narrative potential in-between "stations" of transmediation


-> (narrative) Immediacy

tendency of transparent and accessible representation

-> (narrative) Hypermediacy

tendency of drawing attention to modes of representation


-> (narrative) Immediacy

tendency of transparent and accessible representation

-> (narrative) Hypermediacy

tendency of drawing attention to modes of representation

REQUIRES


-> Remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999)

process of rendering one medium within another

(in favor of immediacy or hypermediacy)


-> Convergence (Jenkins 2006)

Media (and thus mediations of narrative) may shift in content, technological realization, cultural significance

However: cannot simply just vanish


-> Convergence (Jenkins 2006)

Media (and thus mediations of narrative) may shift in content, technological realization, cultural significance

However: cannot simply just vanish

Necessity of multimodality (in new media)


(also valid for the video game adaptation The Wolf Among Us, of course)

-> draws upon a large narrative tradition

-> mythological fairy-tale characters "transmediate" into present time New York

given consistently rendered forms, assigning to each a single body(Zolkover 2014)

-> creates transmedial intertextuality between the traditional renderings of the narratives (& their characters) and their reimagination


Willingham, Bill. Fables / Legends in Exile. New York: DC Comics, 2012. Print.


-> video game narration achieved by various means

e.g.: text, voice-overs, cinematic techniques, player interaction, player's own perception of their interaction with the medium ...

Telltale Games. The Wolf Among Us. 2014.


-> integration of social elements contribute to further convergence toward "hypermediated" spaces



-> branching storylines and NPC-interaction (increases feeling of immediacy)



-> borrowings from conventions of film (here: over the shoulder shot)


Conclusion

-> traditional concepts of narratology and mediation cannot do justice to these recent developments in narrativity

-> processes like remediation and convergence gain increasing importance with the rise of new (multimodal) technologies of mediation

Conclusion

"Our stories used to be so simple. We had a beginning, a middle, and an end. But ever since we got to this awful city, everything‟s gotten so confused.”

(Ichabod Crane in The Wolf Among Us)

Works Cited

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation / Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture / Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.

Telltale Games. The Wolf Among Us. Telltale Games, 2014. Computer Software.

Vandermeersche, Geert. “Intermediality as Cultural Literacy and Teaching the Graphic Novel.” Comparative Literature and Culture 13:3 (2011): n.pag. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Willingham, Bill. Fables / Legends in Exile. New York: DC Comics, 2012. Print.

Zolkover, Adam. “Corporealizing Fairy Tales: The Body, the Bawdy, and the Carnivalesque in the Comic Book Fables.” Marvels & Tales 22:1 (2008): 38-51. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Further ReadingDomsch, Sebastian. Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2008. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1:1 (2001): n.pag. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

Frasca, Gonzalo. “Simulation Versus Narrative.” The Video Game Reader. Ed. Wolf, Mark J.P, and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003. 221-36. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

Holtzmann, Steven. Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2006. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

Hyles, Katherine N. My Mother Was A Computer / Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

Kress, Günther. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Kukkonen, Karin. “Comics as A Test Case for Transmedial Narratology.” Substance 40:1 (2011): 34-52. Web. 2 Mar. 2014.

Rippl, Gabriele and Lukas Etter. “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels / Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Ed. Stein, Daniel and Jan-Noel Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 191-218. Print.

Ryan, Marie Laure. Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999. Print.

Presentation on "The Wolf Among Us" as a multimodal narrative

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