Schell, Jesse
2008
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

299-307
He talks about transmedia worlds and says Jenkins coined the term (did he really?).

301
Definition-transmedia world:
“Henry Jenkins coined the term transmedia worlds to refer to fantasy worlds that can be entered through many different media — print, video, animation, toys, games, and many others. This is a very useful concept, for it really is as if the world exists apart from the media that support it. Many people find this a bizarre concept — they think of books, films, games, and toys as separate things, each standing on their own. But more and more often, the real product that is created is not a story, or a toy, or a game, but a world. But you can’t sell a world [oh I think you can], so these various products are sold as gateways into this world, each leading to different parts of it. And if the world is well-constructed, the more gateways you visit, the more real and solid the world will become in your imagination. But if these gateways contradict each other or provide inconsistent information, the world crumbles quickly into dust and ashes, and suddenly the products are worth nothing.”
“Why do worlds become so real for us, more real than the media that define them? It is because we want them to be real. Some part of us wants to believe that these worlds aren’t just stories in books, sets of rules, or actors on a screen, but that these worlds actually exist, and that maybe, somehow, someday, we can find our way to them.”
“This is why people so casually throw out magazines, but hesitate before throwing out a comic book — after all, there’s a world in there.”

299-303
Explains the transmedia world of Pokémon.

303-305
Transmedia worlds have 3 properties that make them interesting:

• They are powerful
• They are long lived
• They evolve over time

304f
He gives great examples of how transmedia worlds can evolve over time and stay coherent even though there is no entarch behind it:

• It was never mentioned in the original books that Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker cap and an oversized calabash pipe. A theatre actor (William Gillette) invented them. And they stuck.
• Santa Claus‘ reindeer were introduced in 1823 and Rudolph in 1939, and both became canonical. Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum’s additions however (“Santa’s origin as a mortal selected for immortality by a council of nymphs, gnomes, and demons”, p. 305) never stuck.

305
“Who decides which new features enter a transmedia world, and which ones are rejected? It somehow happens as part of our collective consciousness. Through some unspoken democratic process, everyone just decides whether a particular feature seems appropriate or inappropriate, and the fictional world changes slightly to accommodate. There is no formal decision — it just happens. If a story feature is well-liked, it takes root. If not, it fades away. In the long run, the world is governed by those who visit it.” Really fucking good!

305f
Transmedia worlds have several things in common:

• They tend to be rooted in a single medium.
• They are intuitive.
• They have a creative individual at their core.
• They facilitate the telling of many stories.
• They make sense through any of their gateways.
• They are about wish fulfillment.

306
“Transmedia worlds are the future of entertainment.” => EfuckingA!

307
“Lens #74: The Lens of the World
The world of your game is a thing that exists apart. Your game is a doorway to this magic place that exists only in the imagination of your players. To ensure your world has power and integrity, ask yourself these questions:

• How is my world better than the real world?
• Can there be multiple gateways to my world? How do they differ? How do they support each other?
• Is my world centered on a single story, or could many stories happen here?”