Skip to main content

Diigo Home
Home/ fanfic forensics/ Group items tagged games

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Nele Noppe

Chapter 1: Ergodic Literature - 0 views

www.hf.uib.no/...Ergodic.html

open_work fanwork internet phd phd_unfinished literature cybertext games

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 08 Sep 10
     
    espen aarseth
Nele Noppe

Thought Police Can't Protect Real Children - 0 views

www.translativearts.com/thoughtpolice2010ej.html

non-academic manga anime sexual_content children law censorship crime games phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 08 Apr 10 - Cached
  • would have established the catagory of "nonexistent youth"
  • The banning of fictional depictions of child abuse would likely be as meaningless as the banning of fictional depictions of car chasing with the aim toward reducing motor vehicle accidents in real life.

  • If content alone was the issue, war footage and horror films should be banned as well.

  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Content in itself is not the issue--Child pornography has been outlawed because the methods involved in production involve real children in possibly abusive circumstances. How the material was produced is what makes it criminal, not what impression it conveys on the audience. 
  • Child pornography involving real children being sexually abused is horrid beyond words. For that very reason, I find it reprehensible to mix together such acts of human misery and suffering with illusionary fantasy that exists only in the author's imagination. Widening the definition of child pornography to include fictional material belittles the gravity of real sex abuse.
  • Many convicted criminals also cite the Bible as their inspiration of conducting astonishingly savage acts, and yet few would attribute the Bible as the root cause of such criminal behavior. Why?--Because free societies accept the principle that people are responsible for their own actions.
  • It is very dangerous to restrict the actions and rights of citizens based on the principle that some limited number of individuals may act irresponsibly. This is the equivalent of removing knives from the household kitchen because someone used a meat cleaver to commit a crime. Again, this logic is unbelievably reckless as well.
  • Furthermore, crime statistics published by the Japanese police themselves show no causality between the proliferation of erotic material and sex crimes. The crime rate has dramatically decreased since WW2 while the availability of erotica and violent fictional entertainment has risen by leaps and bounds during the same period.
  • It is easily imaginable that an endless cycle of accusations and denials will unfold regarding establishing the "true age" of fictional characters. Authors and publishers will more than likely attempt to proclaim that the characters look young, but they are actually above the age of 18. Physical attributes vary between widely depending on race and ethnicity, not to mention fictional non-human characters.
  • Publishers and authors are extremely proficient in adapting toward new regulations. If graphical depictions are banned, then abstract or comedic depictions will increase.
  • Either an ever increasing set of symbols will be deemed to be inappropriate to be linked to a core human attribute--human sexuality--or the futility of the ban will lead the law to become impotent over all.
  • Even today, numerous adult manga publications have self censorship standards that are mind-boggling. Authors have complained about how some editors have insisted on having all female characters appearing in their works be endowed with large breasts because drawing women as they appear more like in real life was deemed "too childish looking." 
  • Banning the fictional depictions of minors involved in sexual situations will make a fundamental core human attribute taboo.
  • Such a ban will stifle creativity and impoverish the cultural landscape.
  • The value attributed to works of literature and art change over time. The works of modern art and literature from the last two centuries are filled with examples where they were deemed to be vile, corruptive trash by contemporary authorities, but now these same works enjoy high status as priceless cultural treasures.
  • A culture grows richer through addition, not by subtraction.
  • A ban on fictional depictions of minor engaged in sexual situations has the very real potential to brand individuals as sex offenders even though they have had no sexual contact with real people. I believe there could be no legal justification for destroying people's lives simple because they drew doodles on paper, but the proposed ban would create such a legal precedence. 

  • I am absolutely certain that history will not look back kindly upon such a ban, and it will join a long list of colossal failures of regulatory policy, such as the prohibition of alcohol in the US between 1920 to 1933, various sodomy laws, the comic book code, and bans on socialist literature in Japan during the prewar era.

    It is important to note that all these failed moral crusades were led by virtuous and diligent individuals intent on making the world a better place. 

Nele Noppe

Moe and the Potential of Fantasy in Post-Millenial Japan - 0 views

www.japanesestudies.org.uk/...Bryce.html

academic manga anime moe fans characters romance sexuality games kawaii zoomorphism affect emotion visual_language boys_love dojinshi phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 11 Mar 10 - Cached
  • If kawaii, or the aesthetic of cute, is the longing for the freedom and innocence of youth, manifesting in the junior and high school girl in uniform (Kinsella 1995), then moe is the longing for the purity of characters pre-person, manifesting in androgynous semi and demi human forms. This is called 'jingai,' or outside human, and examples include robots, aliens, dolls and anthropomorphized animals, all stock characters in the moe pantheon. A specific example would be nekomimi, or cat-eared characters. More generally, in order to achieve the desired affect, moe characters are reduced to tiny deformed 'little girl' images with emotive, pupil-less animal eyes
  • I argue fantasy characters offer virtual possibilities and affect
  • Moe is also used by fujoshi, zealous female fans of yaoi, a genre of manga featuring male homosexual romance. However, the word moe indicates a response to fantasy characters, not a specific style, character type or relational pattern. While some things are more likely than others to inspire moe, this paper will focus mainly on the response itself rather than the forms that inspire it.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • Both otaku and fujoshi
  • The moe character is a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and the response to its virtual potentials is affect.
  • Massumi argues affect is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential (Massumi 2002). The experience, what he calls an 'intensity,' is outside of logical language and conscious control. Moe provides a word to express affect, or to identify a form that resonates and can trigger an intensity.
  • It is for this reason that moe is consistently misunderstood as first and foremost images of young girls instead of a response to virtual potentials
  • In the field interacting with otaku and fujoshi, I was constantly confronted by the concept of moe, and found it necessary to engage it.
  • These are both men and their discourse centers on male otaku, but I will argue from them a more general theory, applied later in the paper to fujoshi structures of desire.
  • Honda, a youth-oriented novelist and self-styled moe critic, defines moe as 'imaginary love'
  • the salient point is his judgment that a relationship with a mediated character or material representations of it is preferable to an interpersonal relationship.
  • the moe man is feminized
  • While recognizing the conservative nature of otaku sexuality, Azuma attempts to account for the schizophrenic presence of perversion in the moe image. For Azuma, otaku are postmodern subjects with multiple personalities engendered by their environment and enthusiastic media consumption
  • To feel moe for all characters in all situations, the narrative connecting characters or moments in time is de-emphasized.
  • cat ears,
  • response is unconnected with 'reality' and thus offers new potentials to construct and express affects.
  • Separating their desire from reality allowed for a new form of affect called moe.
  • Simply stated, moe is about unbounded potential.
  • Moe is affect in response to fantasy forms that emerged from information-consumer culture in Japan in the late stages of capitalism.
  • conditioning of young girls into 'pure consumers'
  • Such a space is disconnected from social and political concerns, and exists for the preservation of the individual.
  • the media and consumption feeding into moe is a specific sort centered on affect.
  • Manga scholar Itou Gou argues that since the end of the 1980s characters in anime, manga and videogames became so appealing that fans desired them even without stories (Itou 2005). Ito dubs such character types 'kyara,' distinct from characters (kyarakutaa) embedded in narratives.
  • Proof of this can be found in the rise of 'parody' doujinshi,
  • The doll-like and semi-human Ayanami became the single most popular and influential character in the history of otaku anime; fans still isolate parts of the character to amplify and rearticulate in fan-produced works to inspire moe.
  • In works featuring these characters, the original work functions as a starting point, and the extended process of producing and consuming moe takes place among fans in online discussions and videos, fan-produced comics (doujinshi), costume roleplay (cosplay) and figures.
  • virtual potentiality
  • That the moe form, the body without organs, is outside personal and social frames is precisely why it triggers affect.
  • 'moe otaku' a superficial fixation on surfaces and accelerated consumption of disposable moe kyara, impetus for him to declare this younger generation culturally 'dead'
  • One man I spoke with said, 'Moe is a wish for compassionate human interaction. Moe is a reaction to characters that are more sincere and pure than human beings are today.' Similarly, another man described moe as 'the ultimate expression of male platonic love.' This, he said, was far more stable and rewarding than 'real' love could ever be. Manga artist Akamatsu Ken stresses that moe is the 'maternal love' (boseiai) latent in men,[xxi] and a 'pure love' (junsui na ai) unrelated to sex, the desire to be calmed when looking at a female infant (biyoujo wo mite nagomitai) (Akamatsu 2005). 'The moe target is dependent on us for security (a child, etc.) or won't betray us (a maid, etc.). Or we are raising it (like a pet)' (Akamatsu 2005). This desire to 'nurture' (ikusei) characters is extremely common among fans. Further, moe is about the moment of affect and resists changes ('betrayal') in the future, or what Akamatsu refers to as a 'moratorium' (moratoriamu). Moe media is approached as something of a sanctuary from society (Okada 2008), and as such is couched in a discourse of purity.
  • I will now demonstrate how it is further possible to reduce people to characters, or to reduce reality to fantasy in pursuit of moe.
  • Association with the two-dimensional world, and lack of depth or access in the three-dimensional world, makes a maid moe.[
  • The appeal of the maid cannot purely be sexual: As many as 35 per cent of customers are women
  • this arose in Japan in the late stages of capitalism as a result of shifts in consumer-information society
  • bias towards male fans of anim
  • aoi erases the female presence because fans say female-male or even female-female couples[xxxvi] are too 'raw' (namanamashii). Put another way, the reality of relationships is removed from yaoi to make the moe response possible.
  • the ambiguous yaoi 'male' is quite literally a body without organs
  • Many other fujoshi I spoke with dated men even as they imagined possibilities of coupling them as characters with other men.[xl] As Saitou points out, the reality of heterosexual relationships and virtual possibilities of homosexual couplings are separate and coexistent (Saitou 2007). Journalist Sugiura Yumiko explains this as the crucial difference between fujoshi and otaku, who approach fantasy as an alternative for things that they actually want but cannot realize in this world (Sugiura 2006).[xli] A fujoshi, for example, would not 'marry' a two-dimensional character the way some otaku advocate;
  • Sugiura is importantly highlighting that fantasy and reality are separate and coexistent, but this is widespread in moe culture and not solely a female quality.[xlii] As much as male otaku boast of their two-dimensional wives, they often do so with levity as a self-conscious performance
  • While it is true that men tend to feel moe for single characters that they can possess while women feel moe for relationships or character couplings, this broad difference is fast disappearing. In truth, the media popular among so-called 'moe otaku' in recent years has come to resemble yaoi aesthetics: multiple girls in a nostalgic or fantastic world with minimal male presence and heightened emphasis on relationships and emotions
  • In all cases, the database (Azuma 2009) is present. The elements that constitute and indicate a certain type of top or bottom, for example glasses or hairstyle or height, are predetermined; any given top or bottom is a construct of defined character traits and behavior.
  • One of the most recognizable features of the moe phenomenon is the anthropomorphization of objects into objects of desire. Otaku turn cats, war machines, household appliances and even men of historical significance into beautiful little girls to trigger moe. Reality is flattened, and from it emerge polymorphous forms of stimulation. Similarly, fujoshi can rearticulate anything into beautiful boys and sexualized yaoi relations. Moe characters can be based on a written description or drawn image, a physical person or even anthropomorphized animals, plants and objects.
  • The erotic fantasy effectively re-mystified their world, adding a layer of potential to the mundane (the very ground under their feet!) and making the familiar queer and exciting. Latent potential so unlocked, the three friends replayed the moe relationship across other potential players such as shampoo and conditioner, knife and spoon, salt and pepper.
  • More startling and subversive is 'moe politics' (seiji moe), where national histories, international relations and imposing world leaders are reduced to moe characters across which yaoi romance can be read.
  • It should be noted that Hetaria was written by a man, and these sorts of stories are becoming increasingly popular among young men known as 'fudanshi' (rotten boys).
  • it precisely because it is pure that it can give birth to such perverse and polymorphous possibilities.
Nele Noppe

Creativity in amateur multimedia: Popular culture, critical theory, and HCI - 0 views

74.125.155.132/scholar

amateur_professional fans internet presentation_cwwc creativity open_source theory HCI openness machinima games technology authors communal medium technological_determinism visual_language phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Today, especially in academic circles, this pop
    culture phenomenon is little recognized and even less understood.
  • These analyses reveal relationships among emerging amateur multimedia aesthetics,
    common software authoring tools, and the three theorizations of creativity discussed
    • Nele Noppe
      Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10
       
      VERBAND FANWERK - OPEN SOURCE
  • This paper explores the enabling factors, especially the role of multimedia authoring
    tools, in the recent explosion of amateur multimedia.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Yet control over popular culture by mass
    media is clearly eroding
  • HCI practitioners have explored how software interfaces can enhance and support users in
    general and creativity in particular. Its analytical tools for examining the relationships between
    tools and a concrete group of users vis-à-vis a well-defined explication of tasks both solve and
    create problems. The ability to specify these relationships explicitly greatly facilitates the
    design of systems; yet that same explicit specificity also defines creativity a priori in cybernetic
    terms more friendly to computers than to the culturally diverse and rich practice of creativity
  • Critical theory—an umbrella term that encompasses literary theory, continental
    philosophy, and communication theory, among others—offers sophisticated theoretical
    resources for the study of cultural artifacts and their use in the communities that create them.
    Many of these theories ground themselves in the materiality of the cultural artifacts they
    study; yet the material layer for which these theories were once developed were largely
    textual. The movement of cultural artifacts from the physical to digital poses a deep challenge
    (and some risk) for critics studying digital media with these theories
  • this paper investigates three relevant traditions of theory that address these overlaps: HCI,
    poststructuralism, and theories of technological determinism, especially in media.
  • Creativity—its nature, conditions of possibility, inputs and outputs, and processes—plays a
    major role in virtually all academic, professional, and artistic domains. As a result, it is
    heavily, and heterogeneously, theorized.
  • Genealogically, HCI developed alongside cognitive science and computer science, and was
    most often put in service of professional productivity software.
  • HCI often characterizes creativity in rationalistic, intentional, and scientific ways. For
    example, Schneiderman (2002, 2003) proposes a creativity framework for, in his words,
    “generating excellence” with four parts: collect, relate, create, and donate. With it, he hopes
    to capture the social, iterative, associational, and distributional characteristics of creativity,
    especially as described by cognitive science. Evident in this perspective is an effort to model
    creativity, which is seen as a social activity, with certain structural features that take place in
    environments conducive to creativity.
  • All of this is in service of what Schneiderman calls
    “evolutionary creativity,” which he illustrates as follows:“doctors making cancer diagnoses,
    lawyers preparing briefs, or photo editors producing magazine stories”(2002, p. 238). Here,
    Page 17
    Creativity in Amateur Multimedia
    15
    and pervasive throughout the essay, Schneiderman’s notion of creativity appears to be
    paraphrasable as professional innovation: His interest is not artistic self-expression and, as we
    shall see, he is not alone in understanding creativity in terms of professional discourses
  • Again, creativity is understood as it relates to professional discourses,
    in this case the discourse of art history and its pedagogical presentation to museum-goers.
    Even analyses of group creativity in HCI contexts that seek to go beyond rationalist-
    individualist notions of creativity nonetheless operate in a rationalist mode.
  • The notion of creativity that emerges from these mainstream HCI essays places its
    agency primarily in the intentional activity of the individual (though the individual is
    presumably a member of relevant groups). It sees the ecology of creativity as a community of
    expert practice comprising research, dialogue, and artifact exchange, facilitated by social and
    computer environments that forgivingly compel an iterative and basically scientific
    (correctness, discrete information, classification, hypothesis) approach toward truth.
  • The role of the author-function is, among other things, to control the polyvalence
    intrinsic to texts, such that the author, rather than performing the creative role of bringing the
    text into the world, performs the role of constraining the meaning of the text within a society.
  • (Foucault, 1969/2000, p. 206). Therefore, writing is a
    destabilizing force that threatens to transform the discourse in which it operates and to swallow
    up its own author. It is important to remember that Foucault is not limiting his analysis to
    literary texts; he explicitly includes scientific and academic writing,
  • In this conceptualization of writing, creativity occurs at the level of discursive rule-
    transgressing. The role of the historical human in this process is greatly diminished, not
    because humans are not involved in textual production, but because the individual is at the
    wrong level of granularity for analysis. A given historical individual authoring discourse does
    so within complex interactions involving several selves and the clash of languages
  • Related, but not identical, to Foucault’s notion of authorship are theories of
    “intertextuality” put forward by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Intertextuality is the notion
    Page 19
    Creativity in Amateur Multimedia
    17
    that a text is a “tissue” of (mis) quotations from other texts, considered to be more than mere
    collages, but transformative, of the sign systems from which they are derived (McAfee, 2004)
  • Creativity’s agency lies in the juxtaposition of sign systems (in which authorial
    identities are implicated), which occurs in the context of play, and results in artifacts that are
    significant not for what they say, but for the ways they materially contribute to the generative
    capacity of the discursive rule-set from which they operate.
  • Perhaps the foremost theorist of technological determinism is Jacques Ellul (1964/2003,
    1980/2003), who argues that individuals, science, and government are all “conditioned” by
    technology.
  • Like Schneiderman
    (2002, 2003) and Foucault (1969/2000), Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), too, is making claims
    about the origins and generation of knowledge in scientific discourses, but he situates the
    agency in the fierce pressures of technology as it overwhelms and often replaces the
    comparatively meek procedures of science and governance
  • As a result, according to
    Benjamin, our cognitive experience of the art also changes; whereas painting allows spectators
    to control their own stream of consciousness and reflect on what they see, cinema’s moving
    images disrupt association and contemplation, dominating viewers’ thoughts.
  • Benjamin’s (1936/1968) arguments are developed further by self-described technological
    determinist Marshall McLuhan, whose claim that “the medium is the message”(1964/2003)
    characterizes media as “extensions of ourselves” that “alter sense ratios or patterns of
    perception steadily and without any resistance”(p. 31).
  • For Manovich, the emergence of new visual languages is enabled not by an iterative, rational
    approach to innovation, as cognitive science might suggest; neither does it emerge from an
    evolutionary history of discursive transgression, as a poststructuralist approach might
    suggest 10. Rather, it is made possible by certain forms of productive convenience built into
    authoring tools that unleash visual languages and cultural logics that exceed any human
    intention, whether at the level of the individual or the group of experts.
  • To answer this question, it is useful to consider what the three traditions share in
    common. All consider creativity in the context of professionalism and knowledge production.
    Creativity is not simply about painting a pretty new picture or expressing a personal emotion;
    it contributes to discourses about the world and our place in it. All three traditions also
    understand creativity as situated within systems—networks of software-supported experts,
    discursive sign systems, or systems of production and consumption. All of these implicitly
    reject romantic notions of the individual creative genius and pure self-expression; implied in
    this is a rejection or at least dilution of individual intention as the prime mover of creativity
  • Questions one might ask include the following: What are the social and technical
    conditions or structures necessary for the generation of these artifacts? What is the discourse of
    amateur multimedia? What is the minimal unit of meaning? In what ways does its production
    establish relationships between authors, viewers, technologies, meaning, and ideology?
  • A key first step is to understand how creativity is implemented in multimedia authoring
    software. Each program has ways it encourages authors to work. For example, Photoshop
    greatly rewards users who take advantage of layers, opening up avenues of possibility for
    compositing, nondestructive experimentation, and long-term editability. This in turn makes
    certain meanings (especially meanings created by the juxtapositions of spatial compositing)
    more easily realized than others. To what extent do contemporary authoring platforms
    encourage in the same ways (constituting and compelling a notion of digital creativity), or do
    different applications suggest different notions of digital creativity?
  • Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10
     
    "1"
Nele Noppe

Interview with Umberto Eco (Coppock) - 0 views

carbon.ucdenver.edu/...eco.html

internet literature umberto_eco games fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 15 Jan 10 - Cached

  • "Do you think this might lead to new forms of literature?"

    I have been using a fantastic hypertext for the last 30 years. It is called Scrabble. Isn't it true that with Scrabble you can compose every possible cross link, every combination of sentences. It's a nice game, it can have educational purposes. Sometimes my wife who is German learned part of her English lexicon by playing Scrabble. Sometimes we play Scrabble in English, or in French. OK, but if you are a poet you have your mental Scrabble. You don't need the board to do it. It is the same I think for all those kinds of games. They can be very nice to play. So, I repeat: they can be used for training people in inventing and composing, but they have nothing to do, according to me, with the future of literature.

  • At the present state of the art, if I had to bet all the money I have in my pocket, I would bet more on hyper-systems more than on hypertext.

  • Then, when you read a serious book on Cremonini, first you discover that Cremonini was a great mind of this time, even though he was not an innovator like Gallileo, and that it isn't true that he refused to look into the binocular. He just said: "At the present state of technology, those lenses are very rudimentary, so I don't think that they can really help me to see something more."

    It was an objection to the present primitive state of the art. So what I am making now is probably a statement that we are still at a primitive state of the art. I have not been interested up to now to try virtual reality. Because until it is possible to make love to Marilyn Monroe; until the moment that her clothes start floating away - well, then at that moment I will try! But as long as it is just a sketch of Marilyn Monroe, and I can have the real sensation elsewhere, then the state of the art is so primitive that I prefer to wait, that's all! If you offer me this possibility soon, or better still, if you offer me this possibility when I am 80, I will be enthusiastic about the innovation, and I will become a fanatic supporter!

  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But that's why I say that at this point I have the impression that it is most interesting for educational and training purposes, rather than for providing real new aesthetic experiences.
Nele Noppe

FanFiction.Net - Unleash Your Imagination - 0 views

www.fanfiction.net

anime fan_fiction fans fanwork film games literature manga non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08
     
    Enorme site waar mensen fanfic kunnen publiceren. Niet gemodereerd, fanfic over alle mogelijke media -manga, anime, boeken, films, games, ...
Nele Noppe

Doujin's Commercial Evolution - 1 views

heiseidemocracy.com/...k-doujins-commercial-evolution

anime dojinshi fans fanwork games manga manga_industry non-academic fanficforensics phd

shared by Nele Noppe on 02 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Over the first years of the new millennium these trends continued, with a robust market emerging that combined improved distribution with wider interest to generate revenue for some circles that could no longer be termed “amateur” in any meaningful sense.
    • The doujinshi market grew steadily via promulgation through the internet and pop culture media.
    • This resulted in the viability of the doujin as a means of part time and increasingly full time employment.
    • “Kojin circles” emerged, consisting of a sole creator (kojin) who handled all aspects of production and received all the benefits of income from publications.
    • Larger circles formed semi-professional units to produce doujin software that would compete with professional releases.
    • Otaku goods shops expanded their scope as doujin vendors, acting as proxy sellers for hundreds of circles both via brick and mortar outlets and via online mail order.
    • Online-only doujin shops such as DLsite emerged, selling digital copies of doujinshi via download.
    • Advances in printing technology and cheap, high quality labor (mostly Chinese) allowed for the proliferation of doujin items to media beyond the traditional books (and less tradtional CD-Rs), including towels, pillowcases, fans, cups, trinkets, and figures.
  • new class of semi-pro and professional creators
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • an increasingly large class of professional creators uses doujin sales as a substantial segment of their income, acting as freelance illustrators, mangaka, and designers when they’re not doing doujin work (and vice versa).
  • Perhaps the biggest issue raised by the emergence of this group of professional and semi-pro doujinka is that of intellectual property rights and copyright infringement.
  • in many instances the people producing the doujinshi are the same as those producing the original works being parodied. The doujin scene is so interbred with that of professional anime, manga, and game creators that it would be impractical for all but the largest IP holders to crack down on the parody doujin scene.
  • soft circles
  • Lilith’s business model is the culmination of doujinshi as commerce - small, versatile, ubiquitous, and high quality.
  • The doujin world now spans works from the rank amateur to the polished professional and everything in between,
1 - 17 of 17
Showing 20▼ items per page
Move to top