As the camera rotates, the rings of an astrolabe bearing a sun at its centre appear on the screen. In a brief glimpse, the rings display detailed engravings: scenes of war, dragons defeating an army, the symbols of the Great Houses of Westeros and their animal sigils—a wolf, a stag, a lion, a bear. Then, following the oscillatory movement of the astrolabe, the camera descends onto a map, disclosing castles and temples within cities, towering statues and mountains, and the Wall: all progressively pop up three-dimensionally, bringing into view natural features of earth and ice, and the exquisitely crafted materials of wood, copper, iron, and stone. The opening credits of the adventure-fantasy saga Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–) are a moveable map, covering the territories in which the series’ events take place. Such a map orients the viewer to the changing trajectories of the various characters, evoking the spaces central to the constantly evolving war for the Iron Throne. It visually gathers a complex multitude of dispersed elements. Also, it is a serial map—it changes according to the transformations the fictional world has undergone throughout each season. Its seriality echoes the proliferation of fan-made maps that fill the Internet, which, at times, offer even greater detail and insight than the original.

Mapping practices, and, more specifically, the use of a map as an official paratext—title credits—underline the relevance of space for media content producers and users today. Worlds—as imaginary territories and perennial, collectively built, semiotic realms—are necessary for the understanding of media creation and for the interpretive processes it stimulates. In fact, the tendency to read the contemporary media landscape in terms of fluidity or fragmentation is, by all means, balanced by the growing relevance of aggregation, serialization, and franchising phenomena.

On the one hand, sprawling narratives, maximized customizability, and the increased visibility of sharing practices, including remixes and mash-ups, have come to play a crucial role in media studies. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green researched the spread of media content as it travels across digital networks, where it finds a new home in a multiplicity of sites, often unforeseen by the original creators (Jenkins et al. 2013).