Wee, Kellynn;
(2024)
‘If it's held dear, it’ll get pushed through’: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs).
International Journal of Cultural Studies
10.1177/13678779241244407.
(In press).
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Abstract
Transmedia storytelling is a strategy adopted by media franchises and brands to create participatory story-worlds for their consumers; it incorporates a range of forms, actors, and texts, all of which have varying degrees of narrative authority in determining the events that occur. This article focuses on tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons to show how play cultures in Singapore are shaped by transmedia storytelling techniques. In doing so, it makes two contributions to existing research: first, it shifts scholarly focus from game texts to player practice, showing how communities of play are created through players’ emergent usage of transmedia storytelling techniques. Second, it describes a player practice of soft canon, which I theorise as an approach to shared world-making that prioritises the emotional resonance of narrative details over a positivist accounting of narrative events. The concept of soft canon reveals a new perspective on how communities create and sustain intersubjectively imagined worlds.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | ‘If it's held dear, it’ll get pushed through’: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/13678779241244407 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13678779241244407 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10191835 |
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