Pop Culture Lens: Dungeons and Dragons

In the twenty-fourth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I welcome friend of the podcast, psychologist in training, and long-time gamer Steve Discont to discuss the classic table-top role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. In this episode, we each recall our experiences with role-playing games, from Dungeons and […]

Exploring the Trauma of the Spanish Civil War at the Intersection of Fantasy and Reality

Guillermo del Toro — when he isn’t thrilling us with hellboys or kaiju — has given us some of the most intensely personal and fantastically dark films to explore how we cope with living. In The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, according to Christopher Olson’s interpretation, del Toro is utilizing fantasy tropes to illustrate how […]

“I AM the Doctor.”: The Historical Trajectory of Doctor Who

“I AM the Doctor.”: Polysemic rhetorical flexibility and non-traditional audience reception in Doctor Who By Christopher J. Olson, DePaul University & CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Dominican University This paper was presented at the MPCA 2013 Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. This is the longer version of the presentation, and thus it represents are full current thoughts on […]

Digital game players’ preferences: Analysis of situation and gender

(The literature review for this paper can be found in this previous post.) Study overview As indicated above, our purpose for this study was to enter the literature on gender differences in game playing with two variations on the extant literature. One of these was to include male and female assessments of game playing gratifications […]

Representations of Women in Japanese and American Pop Culture

(From a 2004 paper on a cross-cultural examination of the superheroine) In their article on children and role models, Anderson and Cavallaro (2002) say that superheroes are “larger-than-life symbols of American values and ‘maleness’.” (p. 162). From a socialization point of view, is there reason to be concerned about […]