Landscapes evolve. Forests turn into cities, rivers change course and even mountains slowly erode. Perhaps it stands to reason then, that the landscapes of the fantastic evolve as well. In recent times, the evolution of the imaginary worlds found in speculative works of fiction appears to favour diversity and inclusiveness, keeping in touch with wider societal trends. This transition in fantastic chronotopes is extensively chronicled in the genre of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, or TRPGs for short. The present paper aims to examine the evolution of fantastical landscapes within the very influential TRPG genre through the combined framework of narrative and cultural theories. The settings of the most successful TRPGs, Dungeons and Dragons and World of Darkness, will serve as examples. The results will provide valuable insights into how and why the worlds of speculative fiction change over time, often in response to wider societal change.

Bridging Literacies with Videogames provides an international perspective of literacy practices, gaming culture, and traditional schooling. Featuring studies from Australia, Colombia, South Korea, Canada, and the United States, this edited volume addresses learning in primary, secondary, and tertiary environments with topics related to: • re-creating worlds and texts • massive multiplayer second language learning • videogames and classroom learning These diverse topics will provide scholars, teachers, and curriculum developers with empirical support for bringing videogames into classroom spaces to foster meaning making. Bridging Literacies with Videogames is an essential text for undergraduates, graduates, and faculty interested in contemporizing learning with the medium of the videogame.

This essay explains how the vast open worlds in popular digital role-playing games (DRPGs) such as Bethesda's Fallout 3 (2008) and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) can be used productively in fiction writing classrooms. By employing the concept of environmental storytelling (Jenkins, 2004) and using fan-created wikis of popular videogames as models, instructors can have students collaboratively build their own sprawling and compelling fictional world, populated with hundreds of unique items, locations, and characters using free online tools such as wikis and Google Maps. This radical departure from creative writing's traditional workshop method offers several advantages. First, students are freed from the burden of plot and concentrate fully on crafting discrete narrative units. Second, the collaborative nature of the project presents interesting conflicts for writers as they must agree upon a coherent history, politics, society, and economy for their fictional world. Third, the diversity of interests and backgrounds among students naturally produces a richly complex fictional world full of mystery and surprise that student are eager to explore. This approach also hones students' technical skills with digital tools while still addressing craft concerns typically addressed in creative writing courses, such as character development and scene setting. Chapter available for download from attached link.

A storyscape is the new medium of storytelling. It originates in the model of transmedia storytelling defined by Henry Jenkins (2006a) in Convergence Culture and applied to The Matrix franchise. The storyscape medium is conceptualized from the author/designer perspective as four gestalts that create a whole from stand-alone parts. The four gestalts are mythopoeia, character, canon, and genre. This approach frames the authoring of this story-centric model in opposition to the design approaches of world-building or storyworlds. The four gestalts also provide an academic approach that unites theory and practice with a unified design vocabulary and an orientation toward the creation of a cultural and creative product that is defined as the storyscape medium. Storyscapes, such as The Star Wars franchise or the Marvel Universe, consume the lion’s share of our cultural capital (Johnson 2014). Therefore, the development of a consistent vocabulary, a design approach, and an understanding of how they create meaning and define worldviews is critical to our understanding and practice of a new medium (Dena 2009). This recently ascendant medium (Johnson 2014) evolved from the affordances of digital media and the aggregation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000) of new and old media into a new medium. Starting with the frame of storytelling as a practice and previous aesthetic models such as The Poetics, this research charts the evolution of the storyscape medium across topics of academic transmedia approaches, principles, affordances, and the connecting or conceptualizing principles that act as gestalts. As a central contribution, this work develops a design vocabulary employed in practice across multiple established media. Henry Jenkins (2006a; 2007b; 2010a) worked to establish and define this new medium as a practice of transmedia storytelling but he did not name it. The field is haunted by the multiplicity of story forms that challenge a consistent approach or terminology. For example, canon was explored and defined by Geoffrey Long (2007) as the unifying principle, and Elizabeth Evans (2008) has investigated character as another central element of the transmedia storyscape. These terms and others are refined and coupled with design affordances then applied to my transmedia research project: The Ghost Club storyscape. I apply and validate the storyscape design method through a methodology of “research through design” using the gestalts and affordances that define the medium. A storyscape is a new, rich medium that can be authored and created with a common vocabulary. It implements the gestalts that allow us to design or imagine an expanded story medium with the breadth and power of an ecosystem that has the cultural descriptive capacity and meaning-making power of ancient religions and their extensive mythologies. It is an open work (Eco 1989), told across new and old media with their own affordances, that has the potential to be the most descriptive medium for approximating a complex narrative world without Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and end.

To return is to come or to go back, to turn around, to give back, or restore. A return is an act of coming back, or a thing sent back. There is an implication of repetition. But can something really come back? Is it possible to restore a previous state? Do all things remain unchanged? Do superficially similar situations not contain underlying differences? Stepping into this etymological and philosophical whirlpool, the recent television event Twin Peaks: The Return demonstrates the difficulty of return, the illusion of progress, and the tensions between surface appearance and inner life.

This article looks at how futures studies can use storyworlds to address some of the challenges the field faces. It provides an overview of social constructionism, integral theory/integral futures, and sense-making in the context of the current evolution of futures methodologies. This article also examines the role of narratives generally and science fiction in particular in exploring and communicating about the future. An overview of what storyworlds are and how they have been used in science fiction and futures studies is followed by a pair of cases studies focused on two worldbuilding projects, one for the fictional world of Rilao and the other for the storyworld created for the 2002 film Minority Report. The article concludes with an analysis of how the worldbuilding process is compatible with social constructionism, integral theory/integral futures, and sense-making.