New Understanding (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Featured Who Creates Games?: Developers, Players, and Collaborative Authorship View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Justin Bortnick
Questions around authorship of video games have been a significant source of debate, both commercially and legally, since the early days of the medium's life as popular entertainment. Video game production, much like that of film, is an inherently collaborative process that draws from numerous creative disciplines. Authorial concerns are further complicated by players' abilities to influence the games they play, altering, reframing and reinventing the fundamental narratives both in and around the games. The common video game industry practice of denying crediting to developers further bedevils any attempt to understand who, if anybody, is the "author" of a video game. This paper untangles this knotty question, drawing from the author's firsthand commercial experience making video games, alongside theoretical considerations and historical legal treatments of the question.
Rethinking Academic Currency: Collaborative Authorship and Interdisciplinarity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Hutson
The axiom that "ideas are academic currency" has resonated across disciplines, incentivized through administrative evaluation tools and criteria for promotion in rank. As innovative contributions to a specific field are so highly valued, academics and scholars jealously guard research agendas and associated materials. When collaboration does occur, roles of authorship and contribution are carefully delineated and defined, often through criteria identified by discipline-specific bodies. The system prohibits the timely dissemination of critical information across disciplines, and silos researchers, denying them the beneficial insights from colleagues in other departments in their own institutions. This study presents the results of an institutional approach to research and scholarship to address this instantiated impasse and argues for a reconsideration of "authorship" as defined and rewarded in institutions of higher education. Drawing from international models, the study recommends the promotion of disciplined-based pedagogic research, inquiry-based learning, research-led-teaching and teaching-led-research. Most importantly, the model promotes leveraging a range of field-specific skills to address “wicked problems” beyond the scope of any one researcher or epistemological model.
Transmedia Placemaking: Geocache Storytelling for Locative Immersion View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kevin Moloney, Molly Schaller
The concept of transmedia storytelling has long been associated with either high-budget, blockbuster Hollywood sci-fi franchises or as a predominantly digital publication strategy. This study examines how transmedia storytelling can be effectively deployed in physical, locative spaces to support and deepen complex storytelling across digital and physical media. This approach can provide deeper narrative engagement for small-scale and socially concerned stories that are forced to compete in a rich digital mediascape. We examine the case of Shining Light into Shadows, an experimental project to deploy geocaching for a local history storytelling project that elevates the stories of women and marginalized populations in and around a small city in the American Midwest. This storytelling experiment found that a new public engaged with the larger transmedia storytelling project through a new medium, and created a singular, locative experience of stories that would otherwise only be encountered through the fleeting and often shallow engagement of social media. This study illustrates the importance of bringing stories into the physical spaces associated with their subjects and helping those stories inhabit the reader’s physical world. Local history publishing — a critical infrastructure for community building and placemaking — can benefit greatly from these techniques.
Problems with Lowercasing and Capitalizing Racial Terms: How Major Style Guides Conflict over Writing Conventions for Ethnic Descriptors View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Taube
Recent changes from a key group of stylebooks have created inconsistencies for readers regarding the capitalization of ethnic descriptors. In 2020, The Associated Press (AP) announced it would capitalize Black when referring to people and provided reasons for the change, such as noting a history of discrimination of people based on skin color. The news agency also said it would keep “brown” and “white” lowercase and further promised to monitor how it handles usage. But the change now neglects the style choices of several leading news outlets that have dismissed the updated standard in The Associated Press Stylebook. Certain style guides, such as American Medical Association style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, conflict with AP's new standard because of what they capitalize. Meanwhile, other style guides, such as the Chicago Manual of Style and MLA style, provide greater flexibility and discretion in publishing. In examining these conflicts, empirical tests in this research showed how news articles and academic journal articles are adhering to these standards. And finally, a cultural review of exonyms shows how systemic racism can influence standards.
