introduCtion: AdAptAtion in A ConvergenCe environMent
17
telling, showing, and the interactive mode, which she finds among other
media in novels (telling), film and TV (showing), and video games and theme
parks (interactive). Hutcheon argues that while “no one mode is inherently
good at doing one thing and not another […], each has at its disposal different
means of expression – media and genres – and so can aim to achieve certain
things better than others.” 21 This fruitful area of research is one in which adaptation studies can build on related fields such as transmedial narratology, for
just as new media call for a new narrative theory, so too do more interactive
media necessitate a rethinking of adaptation studies. This new direction
in adaptation studies will, however, also require critical perspectives from
other disciplines, such as game studies, which have developed alongside
these media and can therefore shed light on their particularities. In order
to fully grasp what such new media adaptations do, newer approaches have
to challenge and complement categories and ways of thinking developed in
the more traditional, hermeneutically oriented, narratological, literary or
film studies approaches that still dominate adaptation studies. 22
Secondly, the networked digital media environment of convergence culture
facilitates fan creations in unprecedented forms and numbers that range from
fanfiction and videos to machinima (videos or films created using computer
21 Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2 nd ed. (New York: Routledge,
2013), 22, 24.
22 In 2004, Marie-Laure Ryan attempted to answer the question “Will New Media Produce
New Narratives?”. She highlighted three shifts in narrative that follow the rise of new media:
“new models of user involvement and new things to do with narrative,” “new ways to present
stories,” as well as the challenge of finding the best fit between a medium and the “form and
substance of the narrative content” best suited for that medium (Marie-Laure Ryan, “Will New
Media Produce New Narratives?” in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed.
Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 354–356). Ten years later,
Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon collected attempts to formulate a “media-conscious narratology” to
meet these demands (Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, eds., Storyworlds across Media:
Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014)), a project
which Thon has since extended into a monograph (Jan-Noël Thon, Transmedial Narratology and
Contemporary Media Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016)). While such attempts
at developing a transmedial or media conscious narratology are, without doubt, productive, an
approach that focuses primarily or even exclusively on narrative may produce its own blind
spots for an analysis of media that work not only, and sometimes not even primarily, through
narrative. This is a point I explore in my attempt to take seriously the media potentiality of video
games and their ludic quality and to caution adaptation scholars against reading the medium
from a perspective that looks only at representations (Johannes Fehrle, “Gaming into the Heart
of Darkness: Adapting Conrad/Coppola,” South Atlantic Review 80, no. 3–4 (2016): 234–253).
Taking a different approach, Werner Schäfke-Zell has highlighted the challenges and chances of
examining video games as texts from a philological perspective in Werner Schäfke, “Videospiele
als Text aus der Perspektive der Editionswissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 32 (2010): 343–353.
17
telling, showing, and the interactive mode, which she finds among other
media in novels (telling), film and TV (showing), and video games and theme
parks (interactive). Hutcheon argues that while “no one mode is inherently
good at doing one thing and not another […], each has at its disposal different
means of expression – media and genres – and so can aim to achieve certain
things better than others.” 21 This fruitful area of research is one in which adaptation studies can build on related fields such as transmedial narratology, for
just as new media call for a new narrative theory, so too do more interactive
media necessitate a rethinking of adaptation studies. This new direction
in adaptation studies will, however, also require critical perspectives from
other disciplines, such as game studies, which have developed alongside
these media and can therefore shed light on their particularities. In order
to fully grasp what such new media adaptations do, newer approaches have
to challenge and complement categories and ways of thinking developed in
the more traditional, hermeneutically oriented, narratological, literary or
film studies approaches that still dominate adaptation studies. 22
Secondly, the networked digital media environment of convergence culture
facilitates fan creations in unprecedented forms and numbers that range from
fanfiction and videos to machinima (videos or films created using computer
21 Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2 nd ed. (New York: Routledge,
2013), 22, 24.
22 In 2004, Marie-Laure Ryan attempted to answer the question “Will New Media Produce
New Narratives?”. She highlighted three shifts in narrative that follow the rise of new media:
“new models of user involvement and new things to do with narrative,” “new ways to present
stories,” as well as the challenge of finding the best fit between a medium and the “form and
substance of the narrative content” best suited for that medium (Marie-Laure Ryan, “Will New
Media Produce New Narratives?” in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed.
Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 354–356). Ten years later,
Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon collected attempts to formulate a “media-conscious narratology” to
meet these demands (Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, eds., Storyworlds across Media:
Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014)), a project
which Thon has since extended into a monograph (Jan-Noël Thon, Transmedial Narratology and
Contemporary Media Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016)). While such attempts
at developing a transmedial or media conscious narratology are, without doubt, productive, an
approach that focuses primarily or even exclusively on narrative may produce its own blind
spots for an analysis of media that work not only, and sometimes not even primarily, through
narrative. This is a point I explore in my attempt to take seriously the media potentiality of video
games and their ludic quality and to caution adaptation scholars against reading the medium
from a perspective that looks only at representations (Johannes Fehrle, “Gaming into the Heart
of Darkness: Adapting Conrad/Coppola,” South Atlantic Review 80, no. 3–4 (2016): 234–253).
Taking a different approach, Werner Schäfke-Zell has highlighted the challenges and chances of
examining video games as texts from a philological perspective in Werner Schäfke, “Videospiele
als Text aus der Perspektive der Editionswissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 32 (2010): 343–353.