Transmedia Storytelling and Textual Transformations: Exploring Adaptation in The Fallow Narratives and the videogame Desistance

Transmedia Storytelling and Textual Transformations: Exploring adaptation in The Fallow Narratives and Desistance Transmedia storytelling is a way of creating a story experience across a variety of media. The media platforms are at some level interconnected within some consistent storyworld and timeline. It may offer some degree of interactive experience and is intended to promote further audience engagement with the various media, generating interest in the entirety of the story. The Fallow Narratives are transmedia storytelling projects that explore the stories and histories of Punch and Judy, examining what may be revealed of the various multi-modal media through the textual generation of the stories. The adapted stories engage with the themes of grief, healing and identity, and are told across: Fallow (animation), The Pier (comic), Desistance (video game), The Deep Machine (songs), Observance (journal), Dell Arte (mixed media), Stain (music video) and The Quay (novel). Desistance is a third-person adventure game that takes place inside a Punch and Judy booth, and explores grief and rebirth initially through the player's search for clues as to their identity. This paper will discuss the development of the transmedia storytelling project The Fallow Narratives, to consider the particular storytelling tensions that come about when considering a coherent and connected narrative and story cosmos where each text is 'fulfilling', but also generates interest to pursue the story through various extensions of the text. Also examining the videogame Desistance, and explore what may be revealed of the distinctiveness of the game form from its initial textual formation.