Blockbuster franchises now extend into playable and inhabitable virtual spaces

Evidence

With the addition of gaming into the brandscape blockbuster narrative, the viewer’s relationship to media products is now envisioned as playable, livable, and inhabitable. In 1989, no one walked out of a viewing of Who Framed Roger ­Rabbit thinking they could actually live in the Toontown depicted on screen. But in the intervening years, Disney has developed a number of virtual spaces that aim to immerse its consumers in a Disneyland that doesn’t require a physical visit. ­Toontown did come online in 2003, an early experiment by Disney’s Virtual Reality Studio to make a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. By 2012, many viewers leaving a screening of Wreck-It Ralph expected that virtual capability. The fictional games in the film were playable online, as were licensed, mobile games that extended the story. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 439

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in tracing a financial instrument from Wall Street to a formal feature of cultural texts — here the playable extension of a film (Wreck-It Ralph) is itself the formal feature.