This post contains my reflections on trying to express my Star Wars fandom in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. These reflections are based on the Twitter thread I ran in the summer and fall of 2020, which can be found here. I tried to reconstruct it chronologically to show the progression of events and my thoughts…
Category: Virtual Worlds
Transjective Media Studies and Reciprocal Determinism
Yep, that’s right — I’m being one of those academics. Engaging in neologisms to make a name for myself. But what I am working through here is an idea for a book project, and I’d love peoples’ comments to help me to do so. Redefining Media Studies A medium is a technology for the storage,…
Virtual World Television as Interactive Television Published
The work that Pooky Amsterdam and I have done on virtual world television has come to a close with the publication of the project’s second journal article in the latest issue of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. The article is titled “A Community of Televised Avatars: Interactivities in virtual world television promoting and acknowledging…
Reviewing the Virtual Worlds Entertainment Study
These thoughts were produced at the end of my time on this project, in May of 2012, for the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University. These thoughts involve my reflection on the project that I completed as part of the research group, and do not reflect the thoughts of anyone else involved with the…
Virtual World Television and Interactive Television
This is the end result of the work I have been doing with Pooky Amsterdam. This paper is the write-up of the presentation Avatars, Audiences and Interactive Television. I do not think there is enough in this paper to make pursuing publication worthwhile, but I do hope to use the categorizations of the three types…
Sense-Making and Avatars Research Proposal
This post contains a research proposal I wrote in 2008 for a project to involve virtual worlds that I never completed. This proposal would be changed to become the main experiment I did with the Roskilde University Virtual Worlds Research Group. If anyone is interested in building off this proposal, then please contact me. Sense-making…
Conversations of GamerGate and Fractured Fandom
One of the things I have been doing this year (i.e. 2015) is trying to better understand what I mean when I say “fractured fandom” and how it manifests in the world. I’ve been writing about it for a couple years now, I have done an online interview study to gather people’s stories, I have…
Ghost Whisperer’s Ghost in the Machine
This essay was originally posted as part of my work for the Virtual Worlds Research Group at Roskilde University. This essay reflects my interest in how pop culture represents new media technologies, such as virtual worlds, as part of the process whereby a society / culture comes to determine what will be the acceptable and…
Metaphors for making sense of virtual worlds
The following paper comes from a presentation given at ECREA in 2010 and at NCA in 2011 (the version of which can be found here on the blog). I submitted this paper to a journal, but never did anything with it after it was rejected. I still think there are interesting ideas in the paper,…
Avatars, Audiences and Interactive Television
This presentation was given at the 100th National Communication Association Conference in Chicago on November 21, 2014. This presentation reflects the work I have done with Pooky Amsterdam to understand the nature and potential of virtual world television as reported in the Journal of Virtual World Research. This presentation was awarded one of the Top…
