Worldbuilding in a Transmedia Age: How Story Worlds Grow Across Film, TV, Games, Novels, and Comics

Some stories end, and you feel “that was a good plot.” Other stories end, and you feel “I could stay in that world forever.”

That second feeling usually comes from worldbuilding. The craft of designing a believable, explorable story world with its own logic, history, cultures, institutions, and everyday texture. In the last two decades, worldbuilding has become even more central because many major franchises no longer live in a single format. They expand across film, TV series, video games, novels, comics, audio, and digital platforms. That expansion is often discussed under one umbrella term: transmedia storytelling.

This article explains worldbuilding and transmedia and shows why they fit together so well. Plus, how to think about “good” transmedia worldbuilding beyond marketing buzzwords.

What Is Worldbuilding?

Worldbuilding is the process of creating a coherent “story world”, a setting that feels real enough for audiences to inhabit mentally, even when the world is fantastical. It’s not only about maps or invented languages. It’s about the system behind the story:

• What rules govern reality here? (Physics, magic, technology, social norms)

• Who has power and how is it maintained?

• What does everyday life look like?

• What events shaped the present?

• What can characters do and what can’t they do?

In worldbuilding theory, a key idea is that a fictional world is not just a backdrop for plot; it can be treated as a structured environment that supports many possible stories. Mark J. P. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds can be designed and experienced across media, sometimes even created by multiple authors, because the “world” becomes a framework that outlives any single narrative thread.

A classic foundation for this thinking is Tolkien’s view of “sub-creation”: the creator makes a “secondary world” that audiences accept as long as it has an inner logic. 

In plain terms: audiences don’t need realism; they need consistency.

What Is Transmedia Storytelling (and What It Isn’t)?

Transmedia storytelling is often misunderstood as “putting the same story on many platforms.” But that’s closer to adaptation or cross-platform distribution.

A cleaner distinction:

• Adaptation: The same story is retold in a new medium (a novel becomes a film, a film becomes a game). The core narrative is re-presented.

• Transmedia storytelling: Different media pieces contribute different parts of a larger story world. Each medium ideally adds something new, not merely repeats.

Henry Jenkins’ widely cited definition frames transmedia as a coordinated approach where story elements are spread across platforms so that each medium makes a distinctive contribution to the overall experience. Put simply, transmedia is less about copying and more about complementing.

This also means transmedia storytelling isn’t just “extra content.” At its best, it’s a design philosophy: what is the best way for each medium to reveal a different layer of the world?

Why Worldbuilding and Transmedia Naturally Belong Together

Transmedia thrives when the “world” is larger than any single plot. If a franchise is built only around one storyline, expansion often feels forced: spin-offs become filler, tie-ins become optional homework, continuity becomes messy.

But if the franchise is built around a compelling world, expansion feels organic because the world has space:

• space for side characters,

• space for different eras,

• space for different genres (political drama, horror, romance, comedy),

• space for different experiences (watching vs. playing vs. reading).

This is why Jenkins famously links transmedia to world making. The sense that contemporary storytelling increasingly sells us not just a plot or a hero, but a world that can host many stories.

Three practical reasons this connection works;

1) Consistency across platforms

If the world’s rules are stable, different media can explore different corners of the same reality without breaking audience trust. Consistency doesn’t mean everything is predictable. It means consequences make sense.

2) Discovery and “depth”

Transmedia audiences enjoy discovery: the feeling that the world has hidden layers and that no single text contains it all. A good world invites the audience to ask questions that the main plot doesn’t fully answer.

3) Participation and community meaning-making

Transmedia often encourages a “collecting” mindset: audiences piece together information across media, discuss it, compare interpretations, and build shared knowledge. This isn’t just fandom noise; it’s part of how transmedia worlds generate long-term engagement.

Worldbuilding Is Not a Checklist: It’s Meaningful Systems

A common mistake is treating worldbuilding as “add more details.” But details without structure are just trivia. Strong worldbuilding feels deep because the world operates like a set of interacting systems.

Here are the worldbuilding layers that most strongly support transmedia expansion:

Geography and space

Maps matter because geography shapes politics, economy, war, travel time, and cultural exchange. If distance and environment don’t affect the story, the world feels flat.

History and turning points

Big events (wars, collapses, revolutions, migrations, discoveries) create “pressure lines” that new stories can tap into. History becomes a transmedia engine: different media can explore different eras.

Institutions and power

Who controls resources, knowledge, violence, or legitimacy? Empires, corporations, religious bodies, guilds, magical orders, crime networks… These create conflict structures that can generate endless plots.

Culture and everyday life

Food, slang, rituals, fashion, entertainment, taboos, family structures… These make the world livable. Games and comics often excel at showing this texture without heavy exposition.

Core rule systems (magic/tech/economy)

Worldbuilding becomes persuasive when limits exist. If magic can fix anything, tension collapses. If technology does everything, conflict becomes arbitrary. Rules create stakes.

What Each Medium Adds to a Story World

The most useful transmedia question is:

What can this medium reveal about the world that other media can’t do as well?

Film: iconic visual world + emotional impact

Film establishes the “look and feel” of the world: architecture, costume, sound, atmosphere. It can make a world instantly legible.

TV series: sustained relationships + institutions + slow-burn politics

TV has time. It can build social networks, institutional conflicts, and long-form character development. It’s ideal for “how the world works” over time.

Novels: interiority + history + nuance

Novels can dive into psychology, ideology, memory, and world history. They are great for making a world feel morally and culturally complex.

Comics: side stories + stylistic world exploration

Comics can explore alternative viewpoints, mini-arcs, and visually inventive corners of the world, often at lower production cost than film/TV.

Video games: rule-based experience + agency

Games don’t only tell you about the world. They make you operate within it. You learn the economy by earning/spending, learn politics through quests, learn geography by traveling, learn ethics through choices. In transmedia, games are powerful because they transform worldbuilding into lived systems.

Elizabeth Evans’ work on transmedia television is helpful here: platforms shape the kind of engagement audiences develop. In other words, a story world is experienced differently depending on the medium, and good transmedia design embraces those differences.

Examples: How Transmedia Worldbuilding Works in Practice

These examples aren’t “the best ever,” but they show different patterns of transmedia world expansion.

The Matrix: world as a puzzle

The Matrix franchise illustrates the idea that key context and backstory can be distributed across media (films, animated shorts, games). The result is a world that feels bigger than the trilogy alone, almost like a mystery you assemble by exploring multiple texts.

Star Wars: a world built for endless eras and genres

Star Wars demonstrates how a strong world supports stories across vastly different time periods, character sets, and tones- films, animated series, comics, novels, and games. The “galaxy” model is transmedia-friendly because the setting naturally contains multiple locations, cultures, and political histories.

Marvel (MCU): shared-world orchestration

The MCU popularized a specific industrial form of transmedia/sharing: many stories interlock within one coordinated universe. The worldbuilding here often revolves around institutions, technologies, and cross-character events that allow narratives to branch and recombine.

Harry Potter/Wizarding World: world first, plots second

Harry Potter is interesting because the world itself became a cultural space audiences wanted to remain inside; through films, supplementary texts, theme-park experiences, games, and fan practices. The “school-world” design (rules, houses, rituals, artifacts) is especially effective for transmedia because it invites identity play and community participation.

The Witcher: multiple “entry points” into the same world

The Witcher shows a modern complexity: audiences may enter the world through novels, games, or series, sometimes treating different media as their “main” version. This creates a transmedia challenge: maintaining coherence while accepting that different media may emphasize different themes or interpret the world differently.

Canon, Continuity, and the “Knot” Problem

As story worlds spread, a common risk appears: continuity overload.

Transmedia audiences often love deep continuity, but newcomers can feel excluded if every text is required homework. A healthy transmedia world typically manages canon in layers:

• Core canon: the main texts that define major rules and events.

• Secondary canon: expansions that deepen the world but aren’t essential.

• Flexible edges: stories that experiment, reinterpret, or remain ambiguous.

Wolf’s discussions of multi-authored worlds and how worlds grow across “authorship circles” help explain why canon management becomes both a creative and cultural negotiation. Transmedia isn’t just content architecture; it’s also meaning architecture, negotiated between producers and communities.

Practical Principles for Strong Transmedia Worldbuilding

If you’re creating or analyzing transmedia worlds, these principles help you evaluate whether the expansion is meaningful:

1) Write a “world bible,” not just a plot outline

Define the rules and systems:

• timeline, institutions, geography, major constraints,

• what cannot happen (limits are crucial),

• what always has consequences.

2) Give each platform a “unique contribution sentence”

Examples:

• “The series will show daily life inside the institution.”

• “The game will make players experience the economy and moral choices.”

• “The comic will explore side arcs and experimental aesthetics.”

If you can’t state a unique contribution, the project may be repetition rather than transmedia.

3) Design multiple entry points

A good transmedia world welcomes different audiences. Each text should be satisfying alone, but richer when connected to others.

4) Use gaps intentionally

Don’t explain everything in one place. Leave “open doors” that future media can explore without breaking consistency.

5) Treat audience participation as part of the ecosystem

Scolari’s work emphasizes that transmedia is also shaped by how users circulate, remix, and discuss content. You can’t fully control, so it’s smarter to design worlds that can survive interpretation.

In Transmedia, the World Is the Main Character

In a transmedia era, it’s increasingly accurate to say that the “main character” of many franchises is not a hero, it’s the world itself. A well-built world can hold multiple stories, survive multiple platforms, and remain emotionally meaningful even when individual plots end.

That’s why worldbuilding and transmedia are such a strong pair. Worldbuilding provides the structure and transmedia provides the motion. When they work together, the result is not “more content.” It’s a world that feels big enough to live in.

References

• Evans, E. (2011). Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media and Daily Life. Routledge.

• Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press.

• Jenkins, H. (2007). “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” (Web essay/blog post).

• Kinder, M. (1993). Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. University of California Press.

• Ryan, M.-L. (2015). “Transmedia Storytelling.” Storyworlds, 7(2).

• Scolari, C. A. (2014). “Transmedia storytelling: New ways of communicating in the digital age.” In Anuario AC/E de cultura digital.

• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1939/1947). “On Fairy-Stories.” (Essay).

• Wolf, M. J. P. (2012). Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. Routledge.