Fans, Bloggers and Gamers - Exploring participatory culture
Author: Henry Jenkins
Chapter: Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans
The author talks about the emergence of a new culture, the participatory culture, that has altered media spectatorship immensely. New tools and technologies to recirculate media content, DIY media production techniques and conglomerates depending on active media audiences have transferred more control over to the spectators/consumers.
As media distribution technologies flourish, fan communities strengthen by having a bigger share of the 'knowledge space' or 'cosmopedia' available to them. The mutual exchange of knowledge helps weigh media content and opens it up to criticism where improvement is required.
With the advent of the internet, cross communication between fans has improved to a great extent. Fans can very effectively affect the outcome of media developments by being supportive or being critical. Broadcasters, knowing this response are quickly able to mould the developments in the direction that their spectators want. A lot of producers and directors are reported to be actively communicating with their programs fanbase and thus absorbing their thoughts and speculations into the program. Similarly game studios integrate gamers and fans into their development cycle thus making their content more spectator-centric. Some even use this type of participatory techniques in their released games like 'The Sims', that allows gamers to buy and sell each others custom-made game commodities. Also some games allow their users to their own version of the game by providing the necessary tools to develop and distribute it to the community.
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Participatory development seems to be a growing phenomena. As Waqar said, the internet has allowed the gaming group to instantly communicate with each other, and that can make a game a success or a failure. However, game developers should still work on surprises and little tweaks / addons. For example, some of the great technological successes (IM, SMS) were just small add ons to the main product. So as great as participatory design is, I think a lot should be left up to the developers too.
ReplyDeleteExactly. In fact most of the bigger successes in the webosphere usually are a small part of a much larger project and with good community feedback are transformed into the main project.
ReplyDeleteFlickr.com, the worlds largest online photo-sharing website, was just a small photo-gallery in a game project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr