A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms

13 Interactivity Creates Deeper Engagement

Some people consider interactivity to be a basic hallmark of transmedia storytelling. Bringing up interaction when you’re talking about transmedia is like mentioning teeth in the context of eating: it’s not a strictly necessary component, but there’s a very strong connection there.

But people can also mean a lot of different things by that one word interactive. You might use it as shorthand for “uses the Internet,” or to mean “the audience influences the outcome.” Neither of these is strictly necessary for a transmedia narrative, as the big franchise projects amply demonstrate.

There is another definition, though, along the lines of “requires or allows audience action to learn more about the story.” ...