5 research outputs found
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Play The News: Fun and Games in Digital Journalism
More than ever before weâre consuming news in strange contexts; mixed into a stream of holiday photos on Facebook, alongside comediansâ quips on twitter; between Candy Crush and transit directions on our smartphones.
In this environment designers can take liberties with the form of the news package and the ways that audiences can interact. But itâs not just users who are invited to experiment with their news: in newsrooms and product development departments, developers and journalists are adopting play as design and authoring process.
Maxwell Foxmanâs new Tow Center report, Play The News: Fun and Games in Digital Journalism is a comprehensive documentation of this world
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Playing with Virtual Reality: Early Adopters of Commercial Immersive Technology
This dissertation examines early adopters of mass-marketed Virtual Reality (VR), as well as other immersive technologies, and the playful processes by which they incorporate the devices into their lives within New York City. Starting in 2016, relatively inexpensive head-mounted displays (HMDs) began to be manufactured and distributed by leaders in the game and information technology industries. However, even before these releases, developers and content creators were testing the devices through âdevelopment kits.â These de facto early adopters, who are distinctly commercially-oriented, acted as a launching point for the dissertation to scrutinize how, why and in what ways digital technologies spread to the wider public.
Taking a multimethod approach that combines semi-structured interviews, two years of participant observation, media discourse analysis and autoethnography, the dissertation details a moment in the diffusion of an innovation and how publicity, social forces and industry influence adoption. This includes studying the media ecosystem which promotes and sustains VR, the role of New York City in framing opportunities and barriers for new users, and a description of meetups as important communities where devotees congregate.
With Game Studies as a backdrop for analysis, the dissertation posits that the blurry relationship between labor and play held by most enthusiasts sustains the process of VR adoption. Their âplayborâ colors not only the rhetoric and the focus of meetups, but also the activities, designs, and, most importantly, the financial and personal expenditures they put forth. Ultimately, play shapes the system of production by which adopters of commercial VR are introduced to the technology and, eventually, weave it into their lives. Situating play at the center of this system highlights that the assimilation of digital media is in part an embodied and irrational experience. It also suggests new models by which future innovations will spread to the public
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Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Games Coverage and its Network of Ambivalences
It's as tough a time as ever for game critics, who seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard placeâan industry that acts as gatekeepers to most of the information they cover and an increasingly combative readership. Because of these tensions, an exploratory study was conducted first of the emergence of game criticism and the historical role of critics in creating the conception of gamer identity and, second, the effect of that identity on criticsâ self-perception of their profession. We find that throughout the late 1980s and the end of the 20th century the game press was complicit in reinforcing the notion of the hardcore, primarily male âgamer,â while at the same time wrestling with their role as mediators between the industry and audience to which they were beholden. Through a subsequent study of articles and public meta-criticism by prominent figures in the field, we describe a network of ambivalences over the basic elements of their practiceâparticularly style, content, and formatâas well as what motivates their daily work. In order to cope with these ambivalences, game critics, in recommending changes to their craft, rely not on the occupational ideologyâor a common set of shared professional valuesâbut instead their personal background and ancillary careers. Finally, after reviewing this network of ambivalences and its effect on games writing, we suggest critics make efforts toward establishing a common critical authority for their field, particularly as their occupation enters the mainstream
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Book Piracy As Peer Preservation
In describing the people, books, and technologies behind one of the largest âshadowâ libraries in the world, we find a tension between the dynamics of sharing and preservation. The paper proceeds to contextualize contemporary book piracy historically, challenging accepted theories of peer production. Through a close analysis of one digital libraryâs system architecture, software and community, we assert that the activities cultivated by its members are closer to that of conservationists of the public libraries movement, with the goal of preserving rather than mass distributing their collected material. Unlike common peer production models emphasis is placed on the expertise of its members as digital preservations, as well as the absorption of digital repositories. Additionally, we highlight issues that arise from their particular form of distributed architecture and community
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The playful newsroom: Iterating and reiterating the news and its publics
The crisis in the journalism industry, intensified with the popularization of the World Wide Web, warrants radical rethinking of the professional identity of journalists and their role in society. This paper first suggests replacing the Habermasian public sphere with Dutch historian Johan Huizingaâs magic circle of play to describe the relationship between the press and its audience. Within this new model, the writer configures the rules and boundaries in which the reader is free to respond and subvert, an interplay that increasingly shapes both current news production and expectations of the public. This paper then explores play and playful attitudes in newsroom practices and output through semi-structured interviews with journalists, game designers and educators. The âGame Teamâ at the news and entertainment Web site BuzzFeed acts as a primary case study of a group of journalists who make a variety of playful products -- from full-fledged games to interactives -- which they iterate and improve over time, in response to readersâ feedback