Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by, but not limited to, 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. Steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the Victorian era or the American "Wild West", where steam power remains in mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power.
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
Girl Genius is an ongoing comic book series turned webcomic, written and drawn by Phil and Kaja Foglio and published by their company Studio Foglio LLC under the imprint Airship Entertainment. The comic won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story three times, has been nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist and twice for Eisner Awards, and won multiple WCCA awards.
Arcana Studio is a Canadian animation studio in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Founded as a comic book publisher by former Coquitlam, British Columbia school teacher; Sean O'Reilly in 2004, it opened an animation division in 2012.
Since the advent of the cyberpunk genre, a number of cyberpunk derivatives have become recognized in their own right as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction, especially in science fiction. Rather than necessarily sharing the digitally and mechanically focused setting of cyberpunk, these derivatives can display other futuristic, or even retrofuturistic, qualities that are drawn from or analogous to cyberpunk: a world built on one particular technology that is extrapolated to a highly sophisticated level, a gritty transreal urban style, or a particular approach to social themes.
A media franchise, also known as a multimedia franchise, is a collection of related media in which several derivative works have been produced from an original creative work of fiction, such as a film, a work of literature, a television program or a video game. Bob Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, defined the word franchise as "something that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories over a long period of time".
Sean Patrick O’Reilly is the owner and operator of Arcana Studio, a comic book company and animation studio located in British Columbia, Canada. He is considered to be one of the most prolific independent comic book writers in Canada, with his works having been published in eleven countries and in numerous different languages.
Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
Dru Pagliassotti is an author of fantasy literature and the editor of The Harrow online magazine.
Elan Lee is an American game designer, developer, and creator. He has designed games for the Xbox; helped create the world’s first Alternate Reality Games; and with Matthew Inman created the card game Exploding Kittens, whose Kickstarter campaign was the most-backed of its day. He and Inman founded the Exploding Kittens company in 2015.
Gail Carriger is an author of steampunk fiction and an American archaeologist. She was born in Bolinas, an unincorporated community in Marin County, California, and attended high school at Marin Academy. She received her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, a masters of science in archaeological materials at England's University of Nottingham in 2000, and a master of arts in anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2008. She is a 2010 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Homestuck is an Internet fiction webcomic series created by American author and artist Andrew Hussie. The fourth and best-known of Hussie's four MS Paint Adventures, it originally ran from April 13, 2009 to April 13, 2016. Though normally described as a webcomic, and partly constituted by a series of single panel pages, Homestuck also relied heavily on Flash animations and instant message logs to convey its story, along with occasional use of browser games.
Digital Book World Publishing Innovation Award is a literary award sponsored by the magazine Digital Book World for innovation in electronic books. "The Publishing Innovation Awards will honor those making strides in this nascent medium." It was announced in 2010 with the inaugural award given January 24, 2011. Award categories include Fiction, Nonfiction, Children's, Reference and Comics. Each category has one unique judge who chooses the winner from a finalist list of three contenders.
Abigail Howard is an American webcomic creator and video game developer from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the co-founder of indie game studio Black Tabby Games, and created the comics Junior Scientist Power Hour,The Last Halloween, and The Crossroads At Midnight.
Sunless Skies is a role-playing video game developed by Failbetter Games. Partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign, the game entered early access in 2017 and released in January 2019, and has been described as a "Gothic horror roleplay game". Sunless Skies is a direct sequel to 2015's Sunless Sea and incorporates similar elements and setting.
The Clockwork Man is a hidden object adventure video game series developed by Greek development studio Total Eclipse Games. Featuring a steampunk setting, The Clockwork Man games typically require players to find a certain number of items hidden somewhere on a painted scene, as well as solve a variety of adventure and logical puzzles in order to progress through the game.
Secret Story Network is an online interactive storytelling experience which operates live role-playing games. Hosted over WhatsApp, SSN was created in 2017 by film, multimedia, and transmedia artist Krishna Stott, creative developer at Bellyfeel, and known for the earlier award-winning interactive film projects Crimeface (2008) and Bolton Storyworld: Codename Winterhill (2016).
Bolton Storyworld: Codename Winterhill is a live-action interactive transmedia thriller which in its final form went live in April 2016. The experience takes place on a participant’s smartphone and involves receiving text and voice messages, exploring websites, participating in puzzles, and watching filmed videos. Lasting five days, the experience operates to a Participant Activated Release Schedule (PARS): as soon as participants activate the experience by texting a code to a promoted mobile number, they initiate the release of media to their smartphones according to a pre-set schedule.
