Final Project Proposal: Complicate the Narrative/"The Romantic Dead"

1. Working Thesis Statement
My project is twofold: I want to produce a short e-book with several essays connecting videogames and literary traditions and thinking, and I want to submit one of those essays, "The Romantic Dead," for publication somewhere.

For the e-book, the purpose is basically "Videogames are a new medium, but they speak to the artistic traditions of the mediums that preceded them and expand on themes and ideas of the past in new ways native to this new interactive medium, and this book shows several ways in which that is true."

For the essay "The Romantic Dead," the thesis is "TellTale's The Walking Dead and Naughty Dog's The Last of Us are both neo-romantic pieces that update the ideals of romanticism to the post-industrial state."

2. Preliminary exploration
I've done plenty on both these fronts. My personal gaming blog has several posts I've already written that link literature and videogames. I read and reviewed Ian Bogost's book How to Do Things With Videogames. I've also curated a lot of content on the debate over videogames as art here.

3. Relevance
To digital culture: Many lament the rise of digital culture as a kind of death of civilization and great art, but this project seeks to prove otherwise, and instead show how digitally native mediums only enhance art and are just another step forward.

To a specific audience: I'm hoping the e-book will serve as a kind of primer for humanities students and teachers trying to bring this new form of expression into their classrooms and studies. Also, I feel like serious gamers--especially those who have played the game I write about--will be very interested in these essays just as a way to get them deeper into the worlds of the games they play.

4. Format
Like I said before, I'll have two formats here: one will be a more formal research paper (that could easily be a guest blog post as well) and the other will be an e-book that I'll also have available in PDF format (I have to typeset a book for a print publishing class I'm taking, so I might as well just do this, right?).

5. Outlet
There are several outlets I'm looking at for both sides of this project.

I really want to submit one or two of the essays to the BYU English Symposium to get these discussions going in the BYU community, but there are other venues I'm exploring as well.

I've been eyeing the online journal Game Studies for awhile, and think "The Romantic Dead" might be a good fit for it. I also like the website First Person Scholar, and though their call for papers says they focus on graduate students, I still think my work could get accepted there. Finally, the RE: Humanities conference is specifically asking for writing about games, so it could be a venue that is eager to accept my work.

6. Curation
Content for analysis: see the pictures and links in my posts here and here.

Secondary texts:

• Jo Ann Bagerly's doctoral dissertation Henry Treece and the New Apocalypse: a Study of English Neo-Romanticism
• Ian Bogost's How to Do Things With Videogames
• Adam Sessler's review of The Last of Us

Community:

• Greg recently showed me the Google+ community World of Video Game where he shared a video from one of my posts that currently has 94 +1's.
• Subreddits /r/gaming, /r/truegaming, and /r/games are all reddit communities interested in games and game thinking
• Video Games is another Google+ community that's very active and encourages a lot of discussion

7. Social Proof

I've worked a lot with both +Greg Bayles and +Gideon Burton already discussing these ideas, and both have reacted positively and encouraged me to move forward. I received a lot of positive feedback when I presented my paper from last semester on Shakespeare and videogames at RMMLA, which encouraged me to keep writing about the connection between literature and videogames. In an information session with the faculty of the MIT graduate program in Comparative Media Studies Writing, the director of the MIT Game Lab, Philip Tan said my research works in perfectly with their program and what's going on in game studies right now.

To be honest, I still feel like I haven't found the community that I know is out there talking about games like I do, but I've found a lot of good people and continue to search all over for like-minded people.

8. Next steps
I have lots of content already, so next steps for me are to figure out the best way to collect these essays into an e-book and how best to distribute that, as well as study the specific submission guidelines for each venue and adapt my work for each of them. I'll also continue searching for communities and venues, just to make sure I get the widest interested audience possible.

Journey and the Epic

Here's another re-post from my personal gaming blog that I'll probably work into my final project.

Journey, developed by thatgamecompany as part of a partnership with Sony, is one of my favorite games ever made. Despite being short, simple, minimalist, and offering virtually no challenge, it has had the biggest impact on me of any game I've ever played, and I'm hardly the only person to say things like that. Among the many reasons already given for why Journey is so great, I'd like to add a new one: Journey is actually the simplest, most universal epic poem ever written.

Possible Venues for the Final Paper/Project -- Pinterest and Identity

Finally getting around to posting my list of venues for my final paper on Pinterest and digital identity. I really liked Greg's suggestion for the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association for the Women's Studies conference, but since the deadline has passed, I thought I should see if I could find something with future deadline and similar subject matter.

Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space -- Although this venue's mission statement says it wants to provide opportunities for doctoral and master's students, it doesn't put that stipulation on those who wish to submit their work. I feel like this would be a good choice for me and lots of other people in my Digital Culture class. It offers a very broad range of topics (such as crowdsourcing in journalism and social media in journalism, +Kayla Swan) , but the one that I would be interested in is the topic of social media and new practices of identity. Check it out if your topic has anything to do with social media. Proposals are due March 7 and full papers in May.

CATaC 2014 Conference -- Culture, Technology, and Communication (CATaC) holds a biennial publication and conference for subjects regarding culture, technology, and communication. This year's conference is dealing with Design/Production and Practice of the aforementioned topics. The topic that I'm interested in is in the Practice category: the construction of identity using online social media. I think this is the venue that I'm leaning toward submitting to. Because I am focusing on one specific social media platform (Pinterest), I think this will be the best option for me. Papers are due February 14.

I think that's it for my potential venues. While doing this research, I also found some options for a couple of my classmates. For +Brittany Hansen I found A Hands-on Approach: The Do-It-Yourself Culture and Economy in the 20th century. Brittany, I'm not sure what your approach is for your paper, but if you have a good historical background connection, then this might be a good venue for you. Next is for +Lizy Cole: Internet Memes and Visual Culture: A Special Issue of a Journal of Visual Culture. According to the description, they said they were very interested in creative formats for submissions in addition to the traditional essay.

Good luck on your final papers and projects, guys!

Potential Presentation Venues for Digital Civilizations Research

I've been looking for different outlets for my research on digital civilizations, so I wanted to post some of my preliminary findings.

• Re: Humanities 2014 is an undergraduate conference focusing on digital studies, so I feel like it will be a perfect setting for my research. The submission deadline is fast approaching, so I'm planning on putting together a proposal over the next few days and submitting it to Dr. Burton for feedback so that I can make the December 1st deadline. This would likely be a good venue for just about any of my classmates as well.
• Interrogating Colonization and New Politics is a graduate conference held at Bowling Green State University, but I'm going to be contacting the conference coordinators to see if they will consider an undergraduate paper. My topic ties in really well with one of their main topics, which involves "digital frontiers." The deadline isn't until March, so this might give me the chance to really figure out what they are looking for and adapt my work to the requirements in hopes of getting accepted despite my undergraduate status.
• EDUCAUSE is also accepting submissions for a conference on digital scholarship, and it has the added benefit of being online as well as in-person. That might prove necessary, as the conference is during the regular school year, and assuming I'm in grad school, I may not have the time nor resources to go gallivanting around Florida (despite the obvious temptation).

As I was looking through papers, I found a couple that might be useful for +Aleesha Bass or anyone else involved in women's studies in the digital age. The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association just recently ended its call for papers for its April 16-April 19 conference, but it may be that they accept late submissions as well. I felt that this would be an especially pertinent area for Aleesha and others. Elsevier journal also has a call for papers going on right now, though it seems to be more about feminism that about media studies. Anyway, it might be worth looking into.

That's all, though, for now. I'll hopefully post some of my progress by Thursday or Friday, and I'll have a draft up soon for anyone who's interested. Thanks for enduring!

Virtual Civilizations: Settling the Digital Wilds

"The British Settlers of 1820 Landing 

in Algoa Bay" (1853), by Thomas Baines

Well, I wanted to do a video to summarize some of the points that I'm going to be hitting in my research project, but time got the best of me, so for now, it'll have to be just an outline. I'll hopefully get to do a video next week sometime (or maybe tomorrow, if the gods smile upon me). So anyway, here we go with the outline. If you have thoughts or suggestions, please leave them in the comments below! Thanks!

Introduction

     -Historical Perspective

               Inheritance of cultural/infrastructural wealth from larger nation (U.S.)

               Requirements for a civilization: what is a civilization?

     -Working Thesis: The Internet represents the heir apparent to the cultural and social wealth of the                     American 'Empire' and will ultimately serve as a crucible for new, digital civilizations.

Digital Governance
     -Already taking root among digital communities
               Bitcoin nation
               EVE Online representative council
               Confederation of Democratic Simulators
     -True Democracy
     -Opt-in citizenship
Virtual Economies
     -Fiat currency
     -Flow of money out of real economy and into digital economies
     -Bitcoin and other digital currencies
     -Interconnectedness of the two markets: hyperinflation, devaluation of yuan, etc.
Arts in the Digital Age
     -Arts exploration
               Harlem Renaissance
               Scottish Highlands
               St. Andrews
               Museums
               Roman Ruins
     -Player-authors: crafting our own worlds
Settling the Digital Wilds (Conclusion)

     -Monuments of our Age

     -William McGaughey: primary institution of power is the internet

     -Call for virtual settlers

Teens and Fandom

I decided to be an altruistic scholar on behalf of Victoria (Sorry, Shelly, didn't mean to step on your toes!)

I became interested in the idea of fandom when I was reading the book Girl Wide Web 2.0 for class. It has an article titled “Me/Her/Draco Malfoy: Fangirl Communitites and Their Fictions” by Jaime Warburton that talks specifically about teen girls and their roles in fan fiction. Although fandom wasn't a prominent point I focused on in my research, I think it will be very helpful for hers. (I have the book if you would like to borrow it, Victoria, since it will not be found anywhere online.)

I also wanted to look at the sources the author used to write this article to see if they might be any use to Victoria, and I think I found a few. (And of course, there are more listed in the book, but these are that I felt would be of the most benefit to Victoria that I could also find online.)

“Is there a fan in the house?: The affective sensibility of fandom” by L. Grossberg in The adoring audience: fan culture and popular media edited by L.A. Lewis. You can find it here or by searching on the library website.

“Fan Fiction Online: Engagement, critical response and affective play through writing” by A. Thomas. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. You can find it here or on the library website.

“Blurring and breaking through the boundaries of narrative, literacy, and identity in adolescent fan fiction” in M. Knobel &C. Lankshear (editors) A new literacies sampler. You can find it here. I was only able to find this source on Google Books, so it only shows a preview of this particular article, but I still think there will be some useful information for you and I think it is very pertinent to your topic.

I also stumbled across this website which has already curated a list of articles regarding fan culture.

I hope this helps, Victoria!

The Romantic Dead

The following is a post from my personal gaming blog, Complicate the Narrative. I'm putting it here because it might work into my final project.

I wrote a little bit last week about my experience with TellTale's The Walking Dead and the rise of what I've come to call "film-games." In that post, I also talked about The Last of Us, another of my favorite games of all time. The two games share a surprising amount of similarities (while feeling like entirely different games), but one that particularly catches my attention is that both could are works of Neo-Romanticism.

(*Sigh* I guess I'm morally obligated to tell you, I will be "spoiling" these games, to the extent that the enjoyment of art really depends on the revelations of its plot.)