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In everyday parlance, the word world usually means one of two things. Either it describes a planet—and all of its countries, inhabitants, and natural features—or it describes a confined domain of human experience; that is, a milieu (as in “the world of professional boxing”). We use world in the first sense when engaging in scientific, environmental, or political discourse and in the second when speaking in a sociological or anthropological mode. If you were to browse through recent scholarship in video game studies, transmedia storytelling, and digital-era fiction, however, you’d discover a third usage, employed in discussions of twenty-first-century (and late-twentieth-century) fiction and narrative. Few new media scholars offer explicit definitions of what world means in this context, but in their application of it to fictional texts and intellectual properties they clearly intend for it to signal a new model for understanding narrative. By approaching fictional texts as worlds, it would seem, emphasis shifts from the study of stories themselves to that of the imaginary settings or spheres in which stories happen. It thus becomes possible to think of storytelling as what Henry Jenkins calls “world-building” or, in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s rendition, the authoring of “vast narratives.”

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