Transmedia Mythopoeia: Towards an Interactive Mythology?

You enter a bookstore and go to the fantasy section. You pick a book. You open it. As you flip through the pages, you suppose, unsurprisingly, that this book contains a fair amount of lore and a map. Why would it not? This is standard practice in fantasy: How else would you immerse your reader in a novel without building a “believable” world? Nonetheless, mythopoeia is not limited to the book form. Films, television series, and videogames also form part of mythopoeia. Storytelling need not be limited to one medium either, or even one at a time, especially when the boundaries are blurred. Transmedia storytelling, for example, is a narrative technique whereby a story is told through different media platforms, usually digital, but sometimes include reality itself. Commentators have noted that the Adventure and Romance Agency, an odd business specializing in creating adventures for their clients in G.K. Chesterton’s Club of Queer Trades, foreshadowed the creation of the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) based upon this concept. Today, this fiction has become a reality. With the advent of the internet, extended reality technology, and artificial intelligence—which have shown storytelling potential—reality has opened itself to be gamified, as well as narrativized, in completely new ways. What will this mean for the mythopoeic works of the future? Moderator: Brian ThomsonTech Mod: Leslie Donovan