Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 37

ARGS, Fandom, and the Digi-Gratis Economy: Interview with Paul Booth (Part Three)

As I read your discussion of "database" narratives, I was reminded of Otaku: Database Animals which was recently translated into English from the original Japanese and has a number of key arguments to make about the way the model of the database is impacting fan creative expression. Do you know this work? If so, how would you position your arguments in relation to its core claims about the encyclopedic nature of Otaku culture?

I hadn't heard of Otaku: Database Animals until I saw your...

ARGS, Fandom, and the Digi-Gratis Economy: An Interview with Paul Booth (Part Two)

You describe the role which British fans have played in helping to reconstruct and restore missing episodes of Doctor Who. Can you describe the situation for us and tell us what it suggests about possible collaborations between media companies and their consumers?

The case of the missing Doctor Who episode is, I think, one of the clearest cases of the "Digi-Gratis" economy, and particularly instructive in the way media companies and media audiences can reciprocally empower one another...

ARGS, Fandom, and the Digi-Gratis Economy: An Interview with Paul Booth (Part One)

This week marks the official release date for a new book, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, which makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of a range of topics which run through this blog.

It's author, Paul Booth, has consented to give me an interview where we talk together about the ways that he thinks Alternate Reality Games can shed light on the practices of online fandom, about how we might push beyond the opposition between producer and consumer, about how we might...

On Mad Men, Aca-Fandom, and the Goals of Cultural Criticism

A few weeks ago, Jason Mittell published a provocative essay on my blog, Just TV, which sought to explain why he dislikes Mad Men, an essay which he framed through reference to the concept of the Aca-fan as cultural critic. The fact that Jason dislikes Mad Men and I like the series is not that significant in and of itself, but Jason uses the essay to challenge some preconceptions about how taste formations work and to trace the trajectory of his relationship to the series. Here are a few...

No, You Do Not Have to Be A Gamer to Like Inception!

Last week, Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times ran a provocative blog post about the mixed reception surrounding the film, Inception, in which yours truly was quoted heavily.

Here is what he quoted me as saying:

If Inception plays especially strongly with a young audience, it's probably because they instinctively grasp its narrative density best, having grown up playing video games. "When it comes to understanding 'Inception,' you've got a real advantage if you're a gamer," says...

Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part Two)

One goal of the book is to help identify design principles that encourage game designers and players to reflect more deeply on their ethical choices. What would a designer learn from studying the contents of this book?

COLLEEN: You ask the question I'm super invested in and excited about! On one hand, I think we have to be careful about what we mean by ethical choices in the context of designing and playing. Both design and play are inherently transgressive (if they are any good). They...

Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part One)

A year or so ago, Karen Shrier, an alumna from the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, asked me to contribute a forward to a book she was co-editing on Ethics and Games with David Gibson. The opening of the piece I wrote for her book gives some sense of how I personally think about these issues:

What a videogame does at heart is teach you how, in the midst of utter chaos, to know what is important, what is not and act on that" -- Colonel Casey Wardynski

"I'm reviewing the situation...

Medium Specificity -- a Syllabus

I have been using this blog to share the syllabi of the new courses I am developing for the University of Southern California -- courses which reflect my long-standing research interests.

This semester, I was asked to develop a course for the multidisciplinary iMap program in the Cinema School, a program which encourages the interplay between theory and practice. The original subject was developed by the late Anne Friedberg, so I am very much aware of her intellectual legacy as I developed ...

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Four)

If Project Superior pulls the superhero genre into the space of independent comics, then a range of recent Marvel and DC projects have pulled the independent and avant garde comics artists into the realm of mainstream comics publishing, again via the figure of the superhero. Here, again, they seek to motivate the experimentation through appeals to character psychology. In this case, DC invites us to imagine what its superhero sagas would look like if they were produced by the denizens of the ...

Man Without Fear: David Mack, Daredevil, and the Bounds of Difference (Part Three)

Last time, I explored some of the ways that David Mack's visual style defines itself outside of the mainstream conventions of superhero comics. Today, I want to start with a recognition that Mack is not the only experimental comic artist who has sought to engage with the superhero genre. In so far as it defines the expectations of what a comic book is, at least in the American comic book, artists often seek to define themselves and their work through contrast with the superhero genre.

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