Griefing Spaces and Disruptive Multi-Platform Narratives
National Communication Association, 2007
Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide argues that the electronic age instigated an era of media convergence where old and new media intersect and the power of the media producer and that of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. His conception of media convergence is not merely the technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same platform, but is rather a phenomenon that represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information, make new connections among dispersed media content, and ultimately produce new texts. Therefore, Jenkins contends that convergence brings about a participatory culture where fans rewrite their favorite shows as fanzines, readers blogs their daily experiences, and gamers personalize their videogames by creating their own challenges.
Media convergence and the participatory culture it elicits bring to mind an important question in terms of literary theory: how does media convergence affect how we read and write in an age where narratives seamlessly migrate from one medium to another and the boundaries between consumers and producers are blurred? Already, hybrid forms of story-telling that offer immersive and interactive environments have emerged in which readers are expected to perform activities that go beyond the mere act of reading. These forms consistently challenge the existence of narrative and force us to reevaluate our pre-existing notions of what a story is. My presentation explores the formation of narratives in Second Life, a rapidly growing massively multiplayer online game.
Second Life provides one of the most attractive Web 2.0 platforms for content creation. The open-source environment provided by Linden Lab, its parent company, which allows the metaverse to be built by its users, provides optimal conditions for textual poaching which leads to the construction of multi-platform narratives. Its users employ blogs, forums, IRC channels, YouTube, Snapzilla, Second Life Safari (a section of Something Awful Web site dedicated to stories of Second Life) to create and perpetuate many stories that are originally born within the world of Second Life. In multi-platform narratives the stories are extended to various diverse platforms, each one unique but all complementary, thereby leaving the formation of texts to the user/reader and, more importantly, necessitating the redefinition of textual space. Using the arguments made by Anna Gunder, Katherine Hayles, and Henry Jenkins, I will investigate the production and consumption of narratives as performative acts that form the text and ultimately elicit different meanings of Second Life.
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