In Transmedia Res: The Ludic Nature of Transmedia Storytelling in Mass Effect

• Author / Creator

  Blomquist, Gregory

• Transmedia storytelling embodies how we interact with and engage in a continuously expanding story across media. In this dissertation, I argue that transmedia storytelling can be better understood through the concept of player agency within game studies, specifically how players choose to navigate these narratives across storyworlds and characters in BioWare’s Mass Effect series. I examine how players must piece together and engage Mass Effect’s storyworld and its characters across media like a puzzle game. This transmedial puzzle can be effectively understood by applying concepts of ludology, including player agency, choice, and interactive engagement, to Mass Effect’s game-centric transmedia story. Video games can offer the most precise parallel to transmedia stories as player-focused experiences that rely on agency to work within and across media. I explore Mass Effect’s transmedia story through a transmedial application of concepts from game studies (ludology). Transmedial ludology, or the practice of understanding and examining transmedia stories as games, offers a critical perspective on how players engage storyworlds and characters that center on player agency. Mass Effect offers choices on how players decide to experience the potential arcs of the series, creating their unique experiences on various paths through and between media.
  With the choices that arise from each path through the Mass Effect series, a player must organize and make sense of massive amounts of information as the transmedia story slowly unravels with new content. Players then construct a path through these interconnected stories to make sense of characters and the storyworld in direct contest with the transmedia story’s inherently challenging amount of content. These stories, and how and in what order players engage them, build off one another and interconnect larger, more complex plotlines. The various media then connect to form the larger transmedia story, creating a singular experience based on each player’s engagement. As such, players must work as collectors, encyclopedists, and detectives to collect, organize, and investigate the complex puzzle created by BioWare. Players must then rely on knowledge from interactive media, networked consumption, and participatory culture to fully realize transmedia storytelling’s potential. Unlike a single game, Mass Effect’s transmedia story is difficult, if not impossible, to control or master, and offers a space for creators and players to reframe and celebrate the ludic element of failure, not only in the games but the transmedia story. This new perspective on transmedia stories can redefine this drive for mastery in video games and reframe how scholars understand agency across media.
  Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of the transmedial player figure within transmedia stories, including how transmedia relies on a central medium, or mothership, to guide the player when exploring and collecting Mass Effect’s transmedia story. Chapter 2 examines how transmedial players mirror Mass Effect’s in-game codex to create real-world encyclopedias through collective knowledge of the storyworld to challenge BioWare’s sense of control and canon, resulting in both groups acknowledging the impossibility of mastering the transmedia story. Chapter 3 focuses on how transmedial players must track down, make sense of, and piece together Mass Effect’s characters from various texts and media like Frankenstein monsters, forming connections with these beings and gaining a clearer understanding of their place in the transmedia story. Chapter 4 explores how the transmedial player must come to terms with their limited power as a player-character through their ludic hybridity as both player, character, and player-character (as Shepard) within Mass Effect’s transmedia story. Throughout, I show how examining transmedia stories as ludic systems offers us new paths towards understanding player agency not as the promise of power, mastery, and entitlement but as a personal connection and responsibility to the construction of and interaction with storyworlds and characters.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Transmedia Storytelling
  • Mass Effect
  • Agency
  • Game Studies

• Graduation date

  Spring 2023

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-x2gf-6c95

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.