Anastasia Salter

Bridget Blodgett

This book examines changing representations of masculinity in geek media, during a time of transition in which “geek” has not only gone mainstream but also become a more contested space than ever, with continual clashes such as Gamergate, the Rabid and Sad Puppies’ attacks on the Hugo Awards, and battles at conventions over “fake geek girls.” Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett critique both gendered depictions of geeks, including shows like Chuck and The Big Bang Theory, and aspirational geek heroes, ranging from the Winchester brothers of Supernatural to BBC’s Sherlock and the varied superheroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Through this analysis, the authors argue that toxic masculinity is deeply embedded in geek culture, and that the identity of geek as victimized other must be redefined before geek culture and media can ever become an inclusive space.

Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing

Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media

"What's Your Quest? examines the future of electronic literature in a world where tablets and e-readers are becoming as common as printed books and where fans everywhere are blurring of the positions of reader and author. The magic of Youtube, the iPad, and adventure gaming draws upon a history of convergence in digital storytelling that has evolved alongside computing itself, as new tools and models for interactive narrative and the increased accessibility of those tools have allowed for a broad range of storytellers to build on these emerging models for literary interaction"--

From Adventure Games to Interactive Books

What Is Your Quest?

Emily K. Johnson

Educational technology adoption is more widespread than ever in the wake of COVID-19, as corporations have commodified student engagement in makeshift packages marketed as gamification. This book seeks to create a space for playful learning in higher education, asserting the need for a pedagogy of care and engagement as well as collaboration with students to help us reimagine education outside of prescriptive educational technology. Virtual learning has turned the course management system into the classroom, and business platforms for streaming video have become awkward substitutions for lecture and discussion. Gaming, once heralded as a potential tool for rethinking our relationship with educational technology, is now inextricably linked in our collective understanding to challenges of misogyny, white supremacy, and the circulation of misinformation. The initial promise of games-based learning seems to linger only as gamification, a form of structuring that creates mechanisms and incentives but limits opportunity for play. As higher education teeters on the brink of unprecedented crisis, this book proclaims the urgent need to find a space for playful learning and to find new inspiration in the platforms and interventions of personal gaming, and in turn restructure the corporatized, surveilling classroom of a gamified world. Through an in-depth analysis of the challenges and opportunities presented by pandemic pedagogy, this book reveals the conditions that led to the widespread failure of adoption of games-based learning and offers a model of hope for a future driven by new tools and platforms for personal, experimental game-making as intellectual inquiry.

Pivoting to Game-Based Learning

Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic

John Murray

Adobe Flash began as a simple animation tool and grew into a multimedia platform that offered a generation of creators and innovators an astonishing range of opportunities to develop and distribute new kinds of digital content. For the better part of a decade, Flash was the de facto standard for dynamic online media, empowering amateur and professional developers to shape the future of the interactive Web. In this book, Anastasia Salter and John Murray trace the evolution of Flash into one of the engines of participatory culture. Salter and Murray investigate Flash as both a fundamental force that shaped perceptions of the web and a key technology that enabled innovative interactive experiences and new forms of gaming. They examine a series of works that exemplify Flash's role in shaping the experience and expectations of web multimedia. Topics include Flash as a platform for developing animation (and the "Flashimation" aesthetic); its capacities for scripting and interactive design; games and genres enabled by the reconstruction of the browser as a games portal; forms and genres of media art that use Flash; and Flash's stance on openness and standards--including its platform-defining battle over the ability to participate in Apple's own proprietary platforms. Flash's exit from the mobile environment in 2011 led some to declare that Flash was dead. But, as Salter and Murray show, not only does Flash live, but its role as a definitive cross-platform tool continues to influence web experience.

Building the Interactive Web

Flash

Mel Stanfill

Increasingly over the past decade, fan credentials on the part of writers, directors, and producers have come to be seen as a guarantee of quality media making—the “fanboy auteur.” Figures like Joss Whedon are both one of “us” and one of “them.” This is a strategy of marketing and branding—it is a claim from the auteur himself or industry PR machines that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling the fan auteur. In A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises, authors Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill examine this phenomenon through a series of case studies featuring fanboys. The volume discusses both popular fanboys, such as J. J. Abrams, Kevin Smith, and Joss Whedon, as well as fangirls like J. K. Rowling, E L James, and Patty Jenkins, and dissects how the fanboy-fangirl auteur dichotomy is constructed and defended by popular media and fans in online spaces, and how this discourse has played in maintaining the exclusionary status quo of geek culture. This book is particularly timely given current discourse, including such incidents as the controversy surrounding Joss Whedon’s so-called feminism, the publication of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and contestation over authorial voices in the DC cinematic universe, as well as broader conversations about toxic masculinity and sexual harassment in Hollywood.

The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises

A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy

Aaron A. Reed

The genre of adventure games is frequently overlooked. Lacking the constantly-evolving graphics and graphic violence of their counterparts in first-person and third-person shooters or role-playing games, they are often marketed to and beloved by players outside of mainstream game communities. While often forgotten by both the industry and academia, adventure games have had (and continue to have) a surprisingly wide influence on contemporary games, in categories including walking simulators, hidden object games, visual novels, and bestselling titles from companies like Telltale and Campo Santo. In this examination of heirs to the genre's legacy, the authors examine the genre from multiple perspectives, connecting technical analysis with critical commentary and social context. This will be the first book to consider this important genre from a comprehensive and transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing upon methods from platform studies, software studies, media studies, and literary studies, they reveal the genre's ludic and narrative origins and patterns, where character (and the player's embodiment of a character) is essential to the experience of play and the choices within a game. A deep structural analysis of adventure games also uncovers an unsteady balance between sometimes contradictory elements of story, exploration, and puzzles: with different games and creators employing a multitude of different solutions to resolving this tension.

Playing the Outsider

Adventure Games

A book-length study of the unique relationship between the audience and creators who are considered to be trusted fans

A Portrait of the Auteur As Fanboy

In the 1990s, the Personal Computer (or PC) was on the rise in homes, and with it came new genres of play. Yet most of the games in these new genres featured fantasylands or humorous science fiction landscapes with low stakes and little to suggest the potential of the PC as a serious space for art and play. Jane Jensen's work and landmark Gabriel Knight series brought a new darkness and personality to PC gaming, offering a first powerful glimpse of what games could be as they came of age. As an author and designer, Jensen brought her approach as a designer-writer hybrid to the forefront of game design, with an approach to developing environments through detailed research to make game settings come to life, an attention to mature dilemmas and complex character development, and an audience-driven vision for genres reaching beyond the typical market approaches of the gaming industry. With a brand new interview with Jensen herself, Anastasia Salter provides the first ever look Jensen's impact and role in advancing interactive narrative and writing in the game design process.

Anastasia Salter

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