Gandalf on the Death Star: Levels of Seriality between Bricks, Bits, and Blockbusters

Nørgård and Toft-Nielsen's article argues that digital seriality in playful franchises should be understood not as a corporately controlled process of transmedia world-building but as a plural, processual, and participant-driven phenomenon. Using LEGO as its central case, the work contends that play itself is inherently serial and that the meaning of a franchise emerges through players' movements across bricks, digital apps, and franchise media. The authors draw on Henry Jenkins's concept of transmedia storytelling but find it too narrow, proposing instead an expanded framework of "serialities-in-use" that encompasses transformational and transgressive forms of fan engagement alongside franchise-directed world-building.

The conceptual apparatus centers on distinctions among intra-, inter-, and para-ludic levels of seriality, and between textual seriality, which operates within immersive play worlds, and actional seriality, which operates through embodied engagement with interaction design. The authors further contrast "drillable" vertical engagement with franchises against "spreadable" horizontal engagement. Their model is organized across three dimensions of technology, social practice, and space, and it combines three abstract logics: transmission or world-building, transformation or world-sharing, and transgression or world-designing. Illustrations draw on LEGO's history, including its 1932 wooden toys, the 1958 interlocking brick, and the 1995 to 2004 period of franchise-dictated, incompatible product lines that nearly ruined the company before its return to classic brick logic.

The analysis is conceptual rather than empirical. It presents no quantitative data, and its authors explicitly position the compound model as a starting point for future research rather than a set of verified findings. Their closing observation, that transgressive fan play can be appropriated and incorporated into commercial product lines, is illustrated by The LEGO Movie (2014). The scope is primarily the LEGO brand and comparable playful franchises such as World of Warcraft and My Little Pony, with the work framed around developments in digital seriality through the mid-2010s.