Category: Audience/Reception Studies

Audience/Reception Studies, Digital Games, Virtual Worlds

April 29, 2012

Hypersexualism in Gameplay and the Problem of the Action Heroine

The history of consumption of video games and computer games has largely been of one-sided demographics: the notion that men are more likely than women, boys more than girls, to play the games that had been the backbone of the gaming industry. This notion has also become entrenched in the stereotype of the gamer as…
Audience/Reception Studies, Critical/Cultural Studies, Fandom

April 21, 2012

That Whole Abortion Thing? Just Kidding!

When Buffy Season 9 Issue 6 came out, I applauded it. I even wrote a whole essay on why I think the story and Buffy’s decision worked. I defended Buffy’s decision to get an abortion as it reflected the struggle modern women have to balance family and career, and I defended Whedon’s decision to have…
Audience/Reception Studies, Research Method(ology)s

April 16, 2012

Cultivated Learning Theory: Graduate school, year one

In the theory class of the first semester of my first year as a graduate student, I was in a group with two other MA hopefuls, and we wrote a paper on how we would study the topic of how the media influences adolescents’ and young adults’ sexual behaviors. Always the clever one, I termed…
Audience/Reception Studies, Industry Analysis Studies

April 1, 2012

Virtual Living Room: CBS and NBC Experiment with Interactive Television

In a previous post, I began a discussion on how American producers — professionals, semi-professionals and amateurs — are experimenting with using Internet-based distribution to promote and produce interactive television. In that post, I highlighted the case study of the live telecast for the SyFy series Ghost Hunters. In this post, I continue this discussion by…
Audience/Reception Studies, Research Method(ology)s

March 30, 2012

Minutia reception analysis

Methods for understanding the moment-by-moment reception of interactive media Oftentimes in media studies that focus on understanding media reception by the audience or the user, there is a focus on reception writ large and post-hoc. That is, there is a tendency to consider the reactions to a media product by the audience/user after the engagement…
Audience/Reception Studies, Digital Games

March 18, 2012

Playing Digital Games as Scaffolding

[This is a research proposal from 2005 on how a child’s cognitive developmental level could interact with digital games’ formal features. The entire proposal, with references, can be found here.] Introduction The history of the mass media has born witness to a chief concern: how will interacting with this or that medium and/or its content…
Audience/Reception Studies, Research Method(ology)s

March 8, 2012

So, Why Did the Media Fail You?

[This post comes from a 2005 research proposal studying how the media was perceived as hindering people. The entire proposal, with full citations and references, can be found here.] Broadcasting or traditional media have been studied by the uses and gratifications perspective (UGP) to uncover the reasons people use traditional media (television, radio, newspapers, even film),…
Audience/Reception Studies

March 6, 2012

Ugetsu, Intertextuality, and the Western Spectator

I want to start off by taking what may be a radical position on how I am conceptualizing film or really any media text. I’m going to take the position of stripping these texts of their accoutrements, designer labels like “entertainment” versus “new” or “high culture” versus “low culture,” and instead I am going to…
Audience/Reception Studies, Digital Games, Research Method(ology)s

January 10, 2012

Women and Video Game Addiction: Experimenting with research narratives

This is an experimental research paper relaying women’s stories, gathered with Sense-Making Methodology interviews, of times they felt they were addicted to video games. My analysis, and thus the framing for this paper’s “narrative”, focuses on the dynamics of power in and around the women’s lives during this period of addiction. This representation of the…
Audience/Reception Studies, Fandom, Industry Analysis Studies

January 9, 2012

Virtual Ghost Hunting: Ghost Hunters and Content Interactivity

With Internet-based television on the rise, we are seeing various producers experimenting with at least three types of interactivity. The most common is access interactivity, which provides control to the television viewer over what to watch, when and where. Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and Facebook are examples of channels experimenting with this access interactivity. Another type…