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Spreadable Media and Gaming
We have been excited to see ideas from Spreadable Media picked up in several of case studies and essays of video games and gaming communities. See some of the latest games-based research that uses the book as a resource below:
- In her 2013 piece for The Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, “Diggy Holes and Jaffa Cakes: The Rise of the Elite Fanproducer in Video-Gaming Culture,” Esther MacCallum-Stewart references Spreadable Media within the trajectory of co-author Henry Jenkins’ longstanding work within fan studies—as MacCallum applies fan studies questions to researching player communities and gaming texts.
- Kiri Miller’s January 2014 New Media & Society piece, “Gaming the System: Gender Performance in Dance Central,” draws on Spreadable Media’s description of how a media text becomes fodder for community discussion/debate when looking at YouTube videos created about the game Dance Central and the charged debates about gender identities that take place in the comments section.
- In their January/February 2014 TechTrends piece, entitled “Participatory Scaling through Augmented Reality: Learning through Local Games,” University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers John Martin, Seann Dikkers, Kurt Squire, and David Gagnon list Spreadable Media among the texts they draw on for their analysis.
- In their piece presented at the June 2013 International Association for Media and Communication Research entitled “Videojuegos y Violencia: Hacia la Búsqueda de una Autorregulación Ética,” on self-regulatory ethics regarding video game violence, Oscar Jaramillo Castro and Lucía Castellón Aguayo from Universidad Mayor Escuela de Periodismo draw on co-author Henry Jenkins’ work, including Spreadable Media…in particular, referencing the book’s distinction between stickiness and spreadability.
- Arcadia University’s Jonathan Church and Michael Klein use a case study of commentary, criticism, and reviews surrounding the game Assassin’s Creed III to look at how gamers “produce a ‘culture of history’ about the game they play through their commitment to commentary and critique” in reviews and gaming websites. In the process, they draw on Spreadable Media to establish how gamers participate in activities surrounding games as part of “the generation and competition of gaming capital” and to establish how today’s online publishing and circulation tools have given “greater persistence and availability” to these gamer activities. Their research, “Assassin’s Creed III and the Aesthetics of Disappointment,” was presented at the Digital Games Research Association 2013 Conference: Defragging Game Studies.