Table of Contents

Introduction  1. Worlds within the World  2. A History of Imaginary Worlds  3. World Structures and Systems of Relationships  4. More Than a Story: Narrative Threads and Narrative Fabric  5. Subcreation within Subcreated Worlds  6. Transmedial Growth and Adaptation  7. Circles of Authorship  Glossary  Appendix: Timeline of Imaginary Worlds

About the Author

Mark J.P. Wolf is Professor of Communication at Concordia University Wisconsin. He is the author of Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni, editor of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games, and co-editor with Bernard Perron of The Video Game Theory Reader 1 and 2, among other books.

Reviews

"Building Imaginary Worlds is a stunning work of scholarship, encyclopedic in its scope, well-informed in its theory, and totally infectious in its enthusiasm for its topic. It will go down as the Bible of imaginary worlds." –Marie-Laure Ryan, author of Avatars of Story"Wolf shifts our focus from particular stories and media to the fantastical contexts we have created. Imaginary worlds express our deepest hopes, but we don't merely imagine these places. We try to live there, and in this choice lies tremendous social disruption." –Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds