Advances in Transmedia Character Personality Design

XARTS 2025 Call for Communications

Analytical considerations-Rationale

Henry Jenkins, the inventor of the term Transmedia, explained eloquently the change in his creative practice over time: When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story you didn’t really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.

These considerations [1] reflect the changes in distribution technologies from cinema theaters to TV networks to internet platforms. As it is frequently the case in the History of media all these changes are interrelated. Immersive experiences of the narrative worlds are taking place across multiple media, engaging the audience through different technological platforms.

How is this affecting the design of characters in transmedia worlds? Following Transmedia Character Theory, “usually, the term character is reserved for such fictional (or fictionalized) protagonists and accordingly opposed to the term person: We are only able to “meet” the former through media texts. In a way, characters can then be regarded as the “currency of media […], their universal means of exchange” [2]. This is especially true for today’s “franchise era” in which media content is produced and distributed in complex industrial practices across interconnected digital platforms [3].

The malleability of digital space permits the construction of animated worlds with transformative qualities, assimilated sometimes to characters. At the same time, interactive VUPs (viewers-users-players) may play the role of characters in transmedia narratives, reflecting parts of their personality in the digital world.

Theoretical considerations- Scripted versus pictorial characters with personality

Theoretical considerations in Character Studies are discussing the difficulties in designing believable characters [4]: In many ways, characters do not even seem restricted to narrative media but are found everywhere around us on material objects, in bodily performances, in adopted figures of speech – in our Umwelt, our Lifeworld. Some narratives – and their characters – might be body-centered (slapstick, cartoons), while others might be mind-centered (psychological narratives or crime dramas); others again might be social-centered (melodramas or sitcoms).

Character traits can then be either (1) physical (what characters look like), (2) mental: We are granted some sort of access to their “inner life,” their subjectivity; as well as (3) social: What relations they share with other protagonists and how they are positioned within their world.

Pictorial media, by contrast, always seem to depict a fictional or fictionalized character “as a whole,” whether there was an actor in front of a camera or whether some cartoonist created a colorful illustration.

Previous Research discussed the background theory for creating believable characters, specifically looking into psychology, animation, communication, and acting to create a repository of models that can be used to towards a comprehensive nonverbal behavior model and formulate its link to character attributes. Acting, Timing and Drawing techniques are available as guiding principles to convey personality to fictional characters. To mention only a few references coming from animation and dance, we may recall Disney’s 12 Principles of Animation [5] and Laban Notation Movement Analysis [6].

IMAGINE- Digital Media and technologies shaping characters

When we come to the implementation of digital worlds, every pictorial element has its equivalent in the data space, analyzed in spatial, color, sound, and texture coordinates. Every change in the data space corresponds to a change in the visualization space and vice versa. Graphic logic is coupled with digital logic, conveying change potential to the represented world.

To complicate things, most of the design principles invented by practitioners in the past were limited to specific media and must be adapted to be used in other media. The design principles may be implemented using various technologies, adding another level of complexity.

Is it possible to provide a new design framework to practitioners, adaptable to digital characters as a currency over different digital media? We tackle this question in a Research Project titled IMAGINE MOCAP funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI), and undertaken by Researchers from the University of the Aegean, the Ionian University and the University of Peloponnese.

IMAGINE stands for Interactive Media, Animation, Games, Interactive Networked Environments, four digital platforms providing room for experimentation in image, interaction, and sound design. We’ve experimented with Motion Capture, Wearables and Live Coding technologies to render personality in digital characters.

Main objectives of this Research are:

• Understand the link between nonverbal behavior patterns and character personality, or what nonverbal behavior patterns we tend to associate with various character types.
• Collect all aspects that manifest character’s personality (emotions, expressions, body movements, appearance, clothing, accessories etc.) and incorporate them in a common workflow for further use in real and non-real time IMAGINE media applications and experiences.

New approaches, new practices, new experiences

In the proposed Special Issue on the Advances in Transmedia Character Personality Design, we are willing to invite researchers and practitioners to share with the Digital Creative community their novel approaches, practices, and experiences in unveiling the personality of digital characters in transmedia worlds.

Expanding the metaphor of the character as currency across media, we would like to explore character personality as the value of the currency and how the exchange of currency modifies this value across IMAGINE platforms.

Additional issues are to be considered in this call for papers: How personality is integrated in new transmedia design frameworks in comparison with existing methodologies [7]? What difference makes to design human versus non-human characters? How do we obtain the immersion of the audience in interacting with believable characters? What strategies unveil character personality in both confronted (using screens) and immersive worlds?

We plan to invite first to join us during the International Conference on Extended Arts- XARTS 2025 (21-22/6/2025) by presenting a communication on the topics of interest, then will go for a peered review consideration of the best papers received for the special issue (independently of the participation in XARTS 2025) to be published by the end of December 2025.

The topics of interest include:

Character personality design in IMAGINE platforms

Transmedia production pipelines considering character personality

Transmedia Worlds designed as characters

Case studies in character personality design

Human versus non-human character design

VUP (Viewer-User-Player) role as a character in transmedia narratives

VUP evaluation of transmedia characters personality

Bodily interactions with transmedia characters

Confronted versus Immersive experiences in transmedia narratives

References

[1] Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press: 114. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qffwr

[2] Leschke, Rainer & Henriette Heidbrink (eds.). 2010. Formen der Figur: Figurenkonzepte in Künsten und Medien. Konstanz: UVK. Discussed in Kunz, T., & Wilde, L.R.A. (2023). Transmedia Character Studies (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003298793

[3] Fleury, J., Hartzheim, B. H., & Mamber, S. (Eds.). (2019). The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy. Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvggx448

[4] Kunz, T., & Wilde, L.R.A. (2023). Transmedia Character Studies (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003298793

[5] Lasseter, J. (1987) Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 21, 35-44

[6] Bishko, L. (2008) Developing Personality, contributed to Furniss, Maureen, The Animation Bible, Abrams, pp. 60-63

[7] Gambarato RR (2013), Transmedia project design: Theoretical and analytical considerations

- Baltic screen media review

Dates to consider

February 1^st, 2025: Call for Participation to XARTS 2025

April 30, 2025: Submission of Conference Paper for XARTS 2025

May 31, 2025: Notification of acceptance for XARTS 2025

June 21-22, 2025: Presentation of the Conference Paper- XARTS 2025

July 31, 2025: Submission of Special Issue Paper

September 30, 2025: Notification of acceptance for the Special Issue

December 2025: Special Issue publication