TY - JOUR AU - Thibault, Mattia PY - 2018 TI - Play with Media, Play with Texts JF - DigitCult - Scientific Journal on Digital Cultures; Vol 3 No 1 (2018) DO - 10.4399/978882551590912 KW - N2 - The centrality of video games in transmedia narratives is a commonly established fact (Jenkins already speaks in Convergent Culture 2006). In addition to video games, however, it is easy to see how other forms of playfulness take their place in transmedia narratives, and not necessarily in “parasitic” positions (such as the Game of Thrones Monopoly ). Toys are probably the most successful ones: think of Lego, a line of construction sets that, at the beginning of the new millennium, began to become part of rich transmedia universes and franchises such as Star Wars or Marvel , and that today arrives to create entire transmedia universes, such as that built around The Lego Movie and which includes films, toys and video games, or to fit smoothly into licensed franchises, often with an ironic attitude: see The Lego Batman Movie . In addition to toys, then, table games, card games, gadgets and merchandising, miniatures, action figures and much more are included in transmedia narratives. If their presence is undeniable and important, their positioning remains difficult to define. If, in fact, we can define video games as a medium without doing too much violence to the term, it would be problematic to do the same with every play activity. On the one hand, because the definition of what is the game is anything but simple and on the other because it is a series of activities that possess a complex series of semiotic levels, both linguistic and textual. This paper, then, attempts to situate the game in the media ecosystem, considering it as a semiotic practice of meaning-making and founded on the creation of extra-play isotopies and thus mapping its possible transtexual (Genette 1982) and transmedia relationships (Jenkins op cit., Scolari 2013). UR - https://digitcult.lim.di.unimi.it/index.php/dc/article/view/65