By examining the legal discourse around collaborative authorship, the real-life production practices, and audience-creator interactions and attitudes, this study provides insight into how media creatives work with audiences to co-create self-representative media, the motivations, and rewards for creative, audiences, and owners.
The project takes into consideration a variety of intersecting identities including gender, race, class, and of course sexual orientation in its analysis. The goal of this project is to better understand the changing conceptions of authorship/ownership, canon/fanon (official text/fan created extensions), and community/capitalism in queer subcultures as an indicator of the potential change in more mainstream cultural attitudes. Within my study, there are four key tactics or queer gestures being explored: remediation, radical ambiguity and multi-forms as queer aesthetics, audience self-representation, alternative financing like micropatronage & licensed fan-made merchandise, and interactivity as performance. The post-millennial queer sensibility is a constellation of aesthetics, self-representation, alternative financing, and interactivity that prioritizes community, trust, and authenticity using new technologies for co-creation. I argue that by using queer gestures of collaborative authorship that reaches out to the audience for canonical contribution create an emerging queer production culture that disidentifies with capitalism even as it negotiates capitalistic structures. These texts are transmedia objects or intertextual commodities.
The study focuses on three main objects or media texts: Carmilla (web series), Welcome to Night Vale (podcast), and Undertale (video game). This dissertation is examining LGBTQ+ audiences and creatives collaborating in the creation of new media texts like web shows, podcasts, and video games. The lack of differences based on sexual orientation and gender traits shows that video games offer an environment for everybody and thus have the potential to bring people together. No other differences were found for game genre selection. They reported playing puzzles more as well. Additionally, LGB people spent more time playing video games than non-LGB people. LGB people showed less competence and intuitive control motivations. Similar results were found for sexual orientation. Negative masculinity increased competence and relatedness while negative femininity decreased autonomy. Only certain gender traits are linked to specific gaming motivations. Participants ( N = 198) answered questions on gender traits (positive/negative feminity/masculinity), gaming motivations, enjoyment, sexual orientation (32.0% of the sample belonged to the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community, later LGB community), and demographics. This study investigated gender traits and sexual orientation to further explain why people play games and what leads to gaming enjoyment.
We argue that attention to these often invisible or transactional aspects of gameplay experiences will allow games scholars to better observe how power and authority are negotiated by players of games.Įxisting research has focused on sex and gender to explain video games playing motivations and enjoyment. We use these examples to position the notion of the periludic at an intersection between game studies, media studies, HCI and social science. Character configuration constrains who players are allowed to be within game worlds, and thus who games are about. Authentication processes control who is permitted to access games and gameplay, and under what legal and conceptual terms. We focus on interfaces for authentication and character configuration because of the practical, legal and performative outcomes they enable and enforce. We term these kinds of peripheral-to-gameplay interfaces periludic, drawing on Genette’s formulation of peritext. These systems-such as authentication and login systems, distribution platforms, menu systems, controllers and character configuration and selection interfaces-serve as thresholds that mediate and dictate who may experience gameplay, and what kind of experience they are permitted to have. In this paper we focus on the interfaces on the periphery of gameplay. While much of the scholarship around games focuses on either communities of play, or the content of the games and gameplay themselves, comparatively little attention has been paid to the infrastructures that players must negotiate to gain access to the gameplay experience.