Revisiting Imaginary Worlds

Mark J. P. Wolf is a Full Professor and Department Chair of the Communication Department at Concordia University, Wisconsin. His books include Abstracting Reality, The Medium of the Video Game, Virtual Morality, The Video Game Explosion, Myst and Riven: The World of the D'ni, Before the Crash, Encyclopedia of Video Games, Building Imaginary Worlds, The LEGO Studies Reader, and Video Games Around the World. With Bernard Perron, he is the co-editor of The Video Game Theory Reader 1 and 2, and the Landmark Video Game book series.

Foreword

Rick Carter



Acknowledgments



Introduction

Mark J. P. Wolf



WORLDS ON THE RISE



Why Worlds Now?

Marie-Laure Ryan



Fictional World-Building as Ritual, Drama, and Medium

Lily Alexander



The Past as an Imaginary World: The Case of Medievalism

Dimitra Fimi



STRUCTURE



The Subcreation of J. R. R .Tolkien’s Middle-earth and How it Became Transmedial Culture

Lars Konzack



Secondary World Infrastructures and Tabletop Fantasy Games

Neal Baker



Battlestar Galactica and Caprica: Using Religion to Create Imagined Worlds

Erica Hurwitz Andrus



Religious Impulse in Video Games: Implications for World-Building
Edward Castronova



Minecraft: Transitional Objects and Transformational Experiences in an Imaginary World

Lori Landay



PRACTICE

A New Wonderland: The Source of It All

Michael O. Riley



"All Over the Map": Building (and Rebuilding) Oz

Henry Jenkins



Discovering the Planiverse

A. K. Dewdney



A Thousand Stories in a Day: Building Rilao and Reimagining Lagos

Laura Cechanowicz, Brian Cantrell, Geoffrey Long, Alex McDowell, Jeff Watson, and Ann Pendleton-Jullian



RECEPTION



‘The First Step into A Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars



William Proctor and Matthew Freeman



The Hyper-enchantment of Visitin