Call for Papers: Media, Fans, and The Sacred: Neoreligiosity Seeks Institution
Call for paper proposals
The deadline for submissions for this issue is August 1st, 2012
Edited by Marc Joly-Corcoran and Vincent Mauger
Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures. The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.
Theme
Kinephanos’ fourth issue aims to explore the relationship between the sacred, the mythological motifs in modern popular fictions, and fandom. Our goal is to understand how the sacred, a pure human emotion, is disembodied from the ‘official’ religious institutions – at least in the Western countries – in order to be reinvested in secular cultural activities like ‘going to see a movie’ or ‘playing a video game’. Eliade wrote: “Movies, a ‘factory of dreams’, are highly inspired by countless mythological motifs, such as the struggle between the Hero and the Monster, battles and initiation ordeals, figures and exemplary patterns” (freely translated from Le sacré et le profane, 174). These mythological stories, highly symbolics, exist since ancient times. However, we would like to address the following issue: how the immersive experience in a work of fiction, now facilitated with various technological media forms (movies, videogames, television shows, etc.), changes our own relationship with the emotion of the sacred sparked in people’s life.
We propose to identify this emotion with the term “neoreligiosity”. An English scholar of fan culture, Matt Hills, says in this regard: “Neoreligiosity implies that the proliferation of discourses of ‘cult’ within media fandom cannot be read as the ‘return’ of religion in a supposedly secularised culture” (Fan Culture, 2002, 119). Indeed, putting side by side the experience of the fan with the religious experience might seem appropriate. Due to a lack of words, needed by fans to describe their own affective experience with their favorite movies, the use of religious terminology seems logical, without calling upon religious institutions structure. Hills quotes Cavicchi: “(…) fans are aware of the parallels between religious devotion and their own devotion. At the very least, the discourse of religious conversion may provide fans with a model for describing the experience of becoming a fan” (2002, 118). This issue of Kinephanos proposes to explore how the sacred, the religiosity, and the neoreligiosity play out in modern popular fictions, and with those who experience it : the fans.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to;
- Sacred and reappropriation (fans creations : fanfics, fanfilms, etc.);
- Social network, sharing interests through Internet;
- Reception, modern and contemporary myths (Star Wars, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, etc.);
- Cinema and religion, displacement of the sacred;
- Videogames, replayability as a tool of self-exploration (Mass Effect, Heavy Rain, morality system, etc.);
- Revelation, epiphany, and the fan’s experience;
- Cinema and videogames, mythological motifs between the lines; vestiges of the sacred;
- Repetition viewing as a ritual, ‘cult fandoms’ and television shows (Star Trek, Doctor. Who, etc.);
- Archetypal figures in the modern mythologies (Order and Chaos, Lovecrafts’s Great Old Ones, the hero’s journey (monomyth) in Hollywood movies, etc.).
How to submit?
Abstracts of 1000 words including the title, the topic and the object(s) that will be studied. Please include bibliographical references, your name, email address and your primary field of study.
Send submissions (in French or English) by August 1st, 2012 to:
marc.joly@umontreal.ca and vincent.mauger@arv.ulaval.ca
Following our approbation sent to you by email (2-3 weeks later after deadline), please send us your completed article by December 1st, 2012.
Editorial rules
Kinephanos is a peer-reviewed Web journal. Each article is evaluated by double-blind peer review. Kinephanos does not retain exclusive rights of published texts. However, material submitted must not have been previously published elsewhere. Future versions of the texts published in other periodicals must reference Kinephanos as its original source.
Production demands
All texts must be written in MLA style. 6,000 words maximum (excluding references but including endnotes) with 1.5 spacing, Times New Roman fonts 12pt, footnotes must be inserted manually in the text as follow : … (1), references must be within the text as follow (Jenkins 2000, 134), a bibliography with all your references, and 5 keywords at the end of the text.
Kinephanos accepts articles in French and in English
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New Facebook Research Project
As I sit and wait for my committee to work their way through my dissertation, I have embarked on a new research project with Dr. Mia Consalvo and Irene Serrano Vazquez. We have two projects in the works at the moment, one looking at how and why people play Facebook games with family, and the other on Facebook player’s perceptions of cheating in Facebook games. We put together a short survey combining the two projects and would love for it if you could take a few minutes (the survey does not take more than 10 minutes – we’ve tested it!), and if you could pass the link along to anyone you know who plays Facebook games, we would be really appreciate the feedback!
Making room (again) for sociality in MMOG’s
A recent blog post over at TAG got me thinking about the role of down time in MMOG’s. Something a lot of (but not all) gamers complain about. It seems that if a game is not chalk full of action, it is often deemed boring or not very good. Over the years, MMOG’s seem to have fallen into this mindset as well, making quests faster (and easier imo), combat is swift, recovery time often little to non-existent, and corpse recoveries that used to take hours turned into a respawn or resurrection…Some people like the fact that the pace of MMOG’s have gone the way of an action-packed, single-player game.
The TAG post mentions that a colleague disliked SWtOR game because there was “no gameplay/no challenge” and the response to this is that he is right …. but the post goes on to say:
But that’s the point… I felt that familiar tedious rhythm of questing in MMOs return. That steady pace, ever incremental, always one more thing on the horizon… time slows, workdays are neglected, worries recede.
And what’s this? Time to ponder, time to think, time to reflect. Playing SWtOR, like all MMOs, brackets time and space — its a virtual world excuse to chat and socialize for some and it’s time alone for others. But what is the nature of this time alone? You are occupied at the keyboard but barely occupied cognitively… this is why MMO players are great multi-taskers. You can play the game while chatting on the phone, watching television, doing email and even playing other games, or… you can ponder and muse about stuff.
Time to ponder and think indeed. For me, the gaps in the gameplay brings mmog play back to its social roots… it is what the waiting is for…… see, back in the day (for me, this starts with EverQuest in 1999), mmog’s were known for long pauses between action, everything took forever to do, even finding a group and getting to the agreed upon location. But they were also known for the close bonds and relationships among guild and group mates because you had nothing to do but hang out and chat while waiting for mana to regen. as mmo’s developed, but as early as Dark age of Camelot gameplay started to shift to exclude the social bits. The big thing was closing the gaps between battles, speeding up the regen time, eventually moving to insta-recast, etc. While this made gameplay more ‘fun’ and action packed for some, what got lost was the available moments for sociality. It didn’t take as long to level up, you didn’t need as many people to help for quests, and battle could rage on almost non-stop as long as you could stay alive. But it came at a cost.
For me, this idea that mmog gameplay should be quicker and there should be less ‘waiting’ is actually what ruined my mmog experience. There was no more time to chat even about in-game stuff; little time to strategize during combat. Every moment had a purpose, unless you consciously chose to sit somewhere and be social, it didn’t happen. See, a lot of people aren’t social by choice (especially in video game play). They don’t want to say “hey, instead of killing mobs and leveling my avatar, I am going log into the game, and go sit in a city or safe place and have a chat with my guildmates, or heck, with random players”. This is not to say that people don’t do this, but having the space to socialize within structure of play is different.
But when the waiting is designed INTO the gameplay then eventually, people talk. They strategize, tell stories of past battles, get to know each other but not “on purpose” … they socialize. Not many people like silence (at least when in a group) – even digital silence – when in a group. It was always just a bit awkward to sit in a group of 6 in EQ back when (or in WoW when I did play) where everyone just sat there, waiting for the mob to spawn or someone to have enough mana to continue… So people chose to fill the silence – the waiting - with social bits… Even people who couldn’t care less about being social, ones who, when you talked to them about it later (as I did for my MA research) didn’t see the value in it as an end within itself, would talk about how these moments, over time, became the social glue that bound a group or guild together. To me, judging solely on the TAG post, it sounds like SWtOR brings that old “waiting” mentality back to mmog’s, slowing the action down and returning to a sort of ‘social’ (or potentially social, some people will just sit in silence, or choose to play alone, etc…) gameplay.
I was always furious when people could not see the value in those downtimes. It is where trust and bonds are made that lead to better gameplay experiences (I say imo, but I know this at least from my experience of interviewing ppl during my MA and just being an MMO player over the course of 5 different mmo’s- of a certain era of course – I stopped playing when the first WoW expansion hit, but still – there are so many stories of bad PUGS, people you will never see again, not only because they were horrible players, but because you didn’t have to bother getting to know who you were playing with. There was hardly time to do so. When you can sign your name to an automatic list for a group, get picked up solely based on your class, get insta-ported into the location, and get into battle within a short period of time, there is no sense of obligation to the group or the individual players. If a group sucked, it was nothing for many players to feign getting booted out of the game to rid themselves of a bad group. But when it took you an hour to get something going, the process of getting your foot into a group through chatting up your skill set and accomplishments, taking the time it takes to travel to the camp spot, when you get there and a group sucks, you stick around if only for the time you’ve invested in getting into the group.
Don’t get me wrong, in EQ back in the day, there were bad pick up groups, there was always that person who could never quite play their class right, or what have, but because you got to know people over time (smaller servers helped of course), and you had already committed so much time in getting the group together, you stuck it out (maybe even just a bit more). And while there will always be crappy groups, in my experience, I’ve found that if you have time to talk about things, even if its just strategy, the group usually gets better. But when the game forces you to be in action 95% of the time, there is less time for the glue to gel. Of course, the addition of VoIP enabled players to have these discussions ‘while’ fighting, but in my experience, voice chat never quite enabled the same type of bonding (I have many theories on that, but I will reserve them for another day).
In the end, I think that all the epic feats talked about among elite players would never have happened (here I am referring to EQ specifically, but it is transferable) or not with the same amount of pride that many elite players have when recounting their stories. In my opinion, without these ‘waiting’ times designed into the game – people would not develop the same levels of attachment to the game, to their avatars and to their fellow guild/group mates, for these epic battles to be successful (and fun), there needs to be a level of trust and camaraderie in place. And trust has space to develop in these moments of waiting….I could go on about this, but I will restrain myself…
Wow….. it’s done
The writing at least. I know there’s still the defense and whatnot, but the tome has been written… it’s incredible to think about it. A very strange bag of emotions …
I cannot believe that what I started in 2004 is done… in 2004, I was having a conversation with one of my professor’s at the time about my relationship with my avatar in EverQuest…Velixious …. trying to explain to him that she was a part of me but that her identity was not mine… but she wasn’t just a character in a videogame… and she wasn’t just something i made … that there was more to it than that… and he pushed me to figure out what that something was that wasn’t otherwise explained by all the other theories of identity that was already out there .. and so .. in 2004, i wrote my honor’s thesis – a lit review of identity across disciplines and I finish 8 years later with one more theory to add to that paper…
still have to defend it but …. wow….
Current Findings in MMO Research and Marriages: Or, my rant about headlines and media coverage
The rounds of headlines that are coming out of the last round of research on the impact of gaming on marriages (and from what I see, MMORPG’s) look like this:
- Wired: MMORPG’s Can Hurt Marriages
- Daily Mail UK: Dungeons, Dragons and Divorce: World of Warcraft can seriously damage your marriage scientists say
- US News: Love and Warcraft: Spouses being pushed aside for video games
When it could look like this:
- Kotaku: Don’t Blame Your Crappy Marriage on Video Games
- Slate: How Playing Online Video Games Can Help Your Marriage
and the most balanced headlines I’ve seen:
- Scientific American: The Perils and Pleasures of Online Gaming for Married Life
- Slate: MMORPG like World of Warcraft can Hurt or Help a Marriage
See, all these articles reference the research of Michelle Ahlstrom, Neil R. Lundberg, Ramon Zabriskie, Dennis Eggett, Gordon B. Lindsay who researched and wrote an article called ME, MY SPOUSE, AND MY AVATAR: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MARITAL SATISFACTION AND PLAYING MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES (MMORPGS)
What bothers me the most is that every one of the articles linked above go on about the statistics and reasons people fight (and divorce) over excessive video game play. Of course, blaming the game, not the person or the relationship (thanks to Kotaku for pointing this out yet again for those who tend to forget). The titles reflect the negative view the media feeds off of when it comes to video games, addiction, social problems, violence, etc… (reminds me of the whole cigarettes are bad for you and lets do everything to make you stop smoking EXCEPT not selling cigarettes, because where would we make all that money from otherwise!? thing – but I digress).
What I find the most interesting is, after all the articles point out the negatives (without mentioning the context of the couples), is that there were positive effects found in the research. But the fact that the abstract itself gives six lines of the bad stuff (detailing it) and ends with “ Positive effects of gaming together were also identified.” …. can you maybe share in the abstract as much as you’ve shared the negative impacts?
Personal anecdote. My partner started playing EverQuest when it was released. It took up all of his time. It made me cranky (he has an obsessive personality). After a few months (3 actually), I decided to see what all the hype was about, made an avatar, loved it so much, we bought a second computer, opened a second account and we played together for 6 years (Dark Age of Camelot, Lineage II, and World of Warcraft). It was some of the best times of our lives as a couple – and as parents of young kids. We were housebound more often than not (never had any babysitters), and we played with Danes so our play schedule wasn’t infringing too badly on family life (and they loved fishing and doing tradeskills, so we all got to play!).
When we were faced with criticism from outside people (who didn’t play), we would always explain that it was no different than spending the weekend together camping, playing golf, whatever. The point was that we were doing something together that we both enjoyed. We even met people from around the world through our gaming experiences (and a trip to Denmark to remember!). Our circumstances and interests centered around gaming, and we are thankful for those bonding times. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had plenty of fights because he didn’t heal fast enough (he was a gnome cleric for a while) or I didn’t get my slow in on the mob fast enough (I always played a shaman)… there were nights I went to bed mad because my corpse was left out to rot (in early EQ days, there was a timer, and if you didn’t get your corpse out in time, your items would disappear – most corpse retrievals were long battles in secondary armor if you weren’t friends with a good monk).
Point is, all of these articles quote the article as saying:
- “According to the study, 76 percent of respondents from the “both game” group “reported that MMORPG playing had a positive effect on their marriages.”
- “The take-home message is that doing things together, whether you’re video gaming or doing something else, is better than doing something apart,” Lundberg says. “This confirms the idea that doing things that create interaction and bonding is obviously going to strengthen a marriage.”
- However, shared gaming produced a positive effect on the marital relationship for 76 percent of the couples playing together (which constituted 62% of the study participants).
Title, Abstract & One Final Push (and some editing)
A (very) brief update today, but I’ve (finally) come up with a title and wrote the formal abstract for my dissertation. After hundreds of pages of writing, one would think that the abstract would not be as challenging as it was. If interested, you can find it here.
I feel a very strange mix of pride and fear as I put this out there. For so many years, I have only talked about my work, while publicly presenting my secondary research interests. In some ways, keeping my primary research close to my chest has kept it safe in my head, but there comes a time when I have to just put it out there, hold my head up and be proud of what I have been working on over the last few years.
Titles
Coming up with a title for my dissertation seems to be harder than when I named my children. How wrong is that!? =)
