Navigating Imaginary Worlds: Wayfinding and Subcreation

This edited anthology offers a collection of essays that each look at various types of wayfinding. Together they explore a variety of wayfinding tools and techniques and their applications, as well as ways of keeping track of the construction of worlds too.

With transmedial worlds extending over multiple media, multiple authors, and sometimes even multiple decades of creation, a wealth of different issues can arise; worlds need to direct audience members into how to organize them conceptually. Edited by Mark J. P Wolf and featuring contributions from a distinguished set of authors from interdisciplinary backgrounds, this book enriches the theory, history, and practice of world-building, through the exploration of navigation. The essays have many overlapping concerns and together they provide the reader with a range of discussions regarding wayfinding and the many ways it intersects with world-building - and world-experiencing - activities. Thus, rather than just analyzing worlds themselves, the anthology also asks the reader to consider analyzing the act of world-building itself.

This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields including Subcreation Studies, Transmedia Studies, Popular Culture, Comparative Media Studies, Video Game Studies, Film Studies, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies.

Mark J. P. Wolf is a professor in the Department of Digital Media and Design at Concordia University Wisconsin, USA. His books include The Video Game Theory Reader 1 and 2 (2003; 2008), The Video Game Explosion (2007), Before the Crash (2012), Encyclopedia of Video Games (two-volume 1st edition, 2012; three-volume 2nd edition, 2021), Building Imaginary Worlds (2012), LEGO Studies (2014), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (1st edition, 2014; 2nd edition, 2023), Video Games Around the World (2015), Video Games and Gaming Culture (2016), Video Games FAQ (2017), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (2017), The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017), The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence (2018), 101 Enigmatic Puzzles: Fractal Mazes, Quantum Chess, Anagram Sudoku, and More (2020), World-Builders on World-Building (2020), Exploring Imaginary Worlds (2020), The Seven Stones (2024), Zoophemera (2024), and Calculated Imagery: A History of Computer Graphics in Hollywood Cinema (2025).