Who is an “artist” being “copied” and who’s just raw material

There’s something racialized about copyright

Crafting is So Hardcore: Masculinized Making in Gaming Representations of Labor

In this paper we examine the representation of crafts in video games, particularly in “crafting systems” – collections of mechanics that are described as crafting within a game's narrative. Real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as reproductive, feminized labor and therefore devalued. Because of this, crafting systems in games have been designed to more closely resemble masculinized, productive labor in the form of repetitive, manufacturing-like mechanics. These representational choices persist even across games lauded for their crafting systems, as our analysis demonstrates. Through an examination of both user-generated tutorials and game mechanics for three games that frequently appear on “best crafting games” lists, we show that games persist in devaluing the reproductive labor of crafting, reducing creative expression and material mastery to marginal and repetitive tasks while catering to the palates of masculine gamers by emphasizing stats-driven progression rather than creative making

But Does Pikachu Love You? Reproductive Labor in Casual and Hardcore Games

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and “core” series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a new set of players with mobile, locative Pokémon hunting. The 2018 release of a hybrid game, Let’s Go, Pikachu! and its sister release Let’s Go, Eevee!, has drawn renewed attention to the casual-hardcore dichotomy, meeting considerable resistance and criticism for its perceived casualization of the franchise. Through analyzing the discourse of the new game’s reception as demonstrated by a dataset of user reviews on Metacritic alongside published game reviews, the gendered nature of the casual-hardcore dichotomy in the Pokémon franchise becomes clear. Key themes coded from the reviewed data include grinding, difficulty, nostalgia, and “cuteness.” Placing this discourse alongside the game’s own internal representations of reproductive labor through Pokémon caretaking and the contested definition of “grinding” demonstrates a fundamental resistance from the so-called hardcore game community to what are viewed as feminized play mechanics. The revealed tension is particularly remarkable given the emotional, reproductive labor of training and loving Pokémon that is front-ended in the franchise’s overarching narrative and core values--a set of values that inherently conflicts with the “hardcore” gamer mentality of play

"The culture industry and participatory audiences," by Emma Keltie

Review of Emma Keltie. The culture industry and participatory audiences. New York: Springer, 2017. Hardcover $99.99 (152 p) (ISBN 9783319490274); e-book$79.99 (ISBN 9783319490281)

Fandom, public, commons

Fans, by creating for a public, also create a public: in producing for a community, they create one. Kindle Worlds and other attempts to monetize fan labor are problematic because the producer is attempting to invent a new mode at the expense of such fannish traditions

Doing fandom, (mis)doing whiteness: Heteronormativity, racialization, and the discursive construction of fandom

The fans depicted in mainstream media representation are unrelentingly white in a way that constructs fandom—from Star Trek to baseball to Elvis—as the property of white bodies. Though whiteness is typically understood in contemporary American culture as a position of privilege, represented fans seem to contradict this conventional wisdom; they are conceptualized in television shows, fictional films, and documentaries as white people deviating from the constructed-as-white norm of heterosexuality and employment through a "childish" fixation on the object of their fandom. Dominant culture produces an idea of fandom as a sort of failed nonheteronormative whiteness that serves a regulatory function, positioning the supposed inadequacy of fans as the result of bad—but correctable—decisions, reinforcing rather than challenging privilege as a natural property of white, heterosexual masculinity as it produces fandom as a racialized construct

Fans of color in femslash

This roundtable discussion brings together a group of fans of color to discuss their experiences specifically in femslash fandom

Where the femslashers are: Media on the lesbian continuum

Some texts are femslashier than others. Drawing on Alexander Doty's argument that television shows with primary relationships between women are "lesbian sitcoms," I argue that media driven by relationships between women are "structurally lesbian media" that generate femslash fandoms