After 'The Last of Us,' Everything Will Be Transmedia

With a selection of creatives invited from across disciplines, the matter at hand would dominate popular culture for the next two decades: How could franchises expand beyond just one or two mediums? How could they achieve what EA's head of intellectual property development, Danny Bilson, called a "deepening of the universe"? That challenge and the book it inspired, Jenkins' Convergence Culture from 2006, turned out to be prophetic. At a time when movie attendance was on the rise, video games were hours long, and the internet was connecting everyone, Jenkins argued that media industries were missing a trick, and competing when they should've been collaborating. In response, he pitched a move into "transmedia storytelling"--a concept akin to the media mix in Japan at the time, where Pokémon dominated everything from anime to key rings. This would allow each medium to do what it does best, he wrote, "so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play."