Character, audience agency and transmedia drama

Changes in the television industry with regard to the development of new media technologies are having a significant impact on audiences' engagement with television drama. This article explores how games can be used to extend audience engagement with audio-visual fiction onto a range of technological platforms to the point where 'television' drama should increasingly be reconsidered as 'transmedia' drama. However, audience engagement with the various elements of a transmedia drama text is complex. By exploring audience attitudes towards characters in the British television series Spooks and its associated games, this article argues that in an increasingly converged media landscape audiences transfer values between platforms. In fact, audiences desire a combination of the viewing positions offered in different media forms. This article therefore demonstrates how distinctions made between television episodes and computer games through ideas of interactivity and audience agency are blurred by engagement with a transmedia drama text.