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This week I was particularly intrigued by Ian Bogost’s “Gamification is Bullshit” piece in The Atlantic. In his polemical essay, Bogost outlines an anti-gamification argument on the grounds of its popular use as a recent marketing gimmick. Bogost even re-labels gamification as “exploitationware” created by marketing consultants with the sole purpose of deception and profit, … Continue reading On Gamification and Generating Concepts

As demonstrated by our discussion on Wednesday, it seems that the question of identification and identity in gaming is hard to pin down. During our discussion, and as I read the articles, I was left wondering: can we define how one identifies with a character if game play is so specific to the individual? Gaming … Continue reading The Application of Identity

After I read Adrienne Shaw’s piece on identification and disidentification with video game characters, I was left wondering why she left this question about Lara Croft open. How do people really identify with Lara Croft? It seems like a deliberate move to leave the question unanswered. Shaw opens with a treatment of the ways that … Continue reading Does Anyone Really Identify with Lara Croft? Ideas for a method.

Since we talked about esports a little bit last Wednesday and I am very interested in it, I have some further thoughts on it, in relation to our class. I am a gamer myself and I pay attention to esports events from time to time, especially during world series times, I will keep track on … Continue reading On Esports

The texts by Hayles, Mirowski, Robinson, and Schüll all stage tensions between different accounts of what happens to the subject when their cognition becomes implicated in a system’s functioning—from the posthuman extension of the organic body’s thresholds (centrifugal) to digital interfaces’ consolidation of an agential subject’s sense of sovereignty (centripetal). Schüll’s study does much to … Continue reading Valences of Cybernetic Volition

As I was organizing my computer files, some notes from my previous jobs made me revisit this week's discussion of audience studies. The essays we read this week in general toke a sociological approach by recognizing one or more phenomenons in society and exploring the reasons behind them. Most importantly, the theories of Lazarsfeld, Radway, … Continue reading The application of audience analysis

While I found Phillips's Toward a Method/ology interesting in its engagement with dimensions of the social world which are less often studied by academics, I felt that Phillips's consideration of her position and her orientation to the sight did not go far enough to overcome the observer/object problematic that still haunts the project of academic … Continue reading Transferring the Gaze, New Exoticization of Internet Deviants

We were categorizing different art forms in class today according to whether they are "high art" or "low art", and the exercise ended when people rightfully pointed out that which is which is highly subjective, personal, and differs based on context and location as well. It was brought up in class that comic art might … Continue reading The Lowest Cultural Art Form

Radway describes how members of Dot‘s focus group use romance novels as shared examples to come to a collective understanding about which of men’s behaviors are acceptable in the eyes of the group, and which are over a collaboratively defined line: books are sites to contest and recalibrate shared norms. Phillips describes the very different … Continue reading Lulz as a way of life: the emotional firewall as a mode of togetherness

The chapter “Toward a Method/ology” in Whitney Phillips’ book This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (2015) led me to think more explicitly about the methods employed in this week’s reading in relation to the written component which acts as a medium through which the researcher translates and transfers their findings to a reader. … Continue reading Detachment Versus the Gravity of Lulz