My main project - in all my scholarship, including my future dissertation - is to open up new media to serious literary investigation: specifically video games, but also some other marginal pieces of cultural production. I, quite frankly, reject the continued exaltation of the "book" as a class of special objects in the 21st century. For many centuries, the book has been incredibly important to the West as a vessel for knowledge, power, and culture, but even while I don't imagine the book is dead (as some maudlin Cassandras insist with every new internet site), I really don't see it having the impact in the next 100 years that it did in the last. Literature - especially the capital "L" literature that academics like to study - simply isn't the location of cultural power any longer.
But I digress...
* My first and probably favorite idea is one I'm calling "Mapping the Multiverse: Warhammer 40K and the Reading of Game Fiction". This possible project would involve an investigation of Warhammer 40,000 as a multi-modal project and how people interact with a single intellectual property in a range of media and modes including books, magazines, websites, comics, conventions, tabletop games, card games, RTS video games, online MMOs, virtual communities, fan groups and so forth. Specifically I think I'd focus heavily on Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War and Blood Ravens: The Dawn of War Omnibus because I think the crossover between book and video game really helps erase the barriers between literary text and video game as cultural product (Basically, Blood Ravens is a 3 part novel covering the events that happen in Dawn of War). After a chapter of work erasing I'd go into the cultural significances I see in Dawn of War, why I think the multi-modal consumption by the audience is important, and finally how to read Dawn of War as a video game fiction (as opposed to just stretching the book-critique rubric over the face of a video game). This would ultimately lead to a "going forward" discussion about reading video games, and especially ones involved in a multi-model intellectual property, as important innovations in how culture is produced as well as a possible source of solutions to problems (especially Postmodern ones) posed by print culture.* I'm considering doing something similar with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning since the Warhammer property has as many modes of interaction as Warhammer 40K, but if one appreciates the differences between W:AR and Dawn of War - 
not just as stories, but as games and interactive spaces - then one understands that the approach would be very different. The main difference lies in how the community interacts with the text. Dawn of War is an RTS game and a novel, but W:AR is an MMO. The dynamics for how an audience interacts with a Massively Multiplayer Online game are unique and touch on a range of other audience-studies issues. So if I did Warhammer, I'd still do the multi-modal inter-textual reading, but it would also necessarily focus more on audience receptions, interpretations, and interactions with the text and the meta-text (like forums, websites, conventions and so forth). It's definitely possible and probably valuable to tackle issues of audience in the MMO and how that relates to Convergence Culture, but it's just a much different project I think than dealing with Convergence itself and trying to read video games from that.
In fact, the MMO experience is different enough that I wonder if perhaps the MMO is somehow different in kind from other games because of the "massively multiplayer" aspect. The MMO facet practically forces one to discuss issues of audience and mass culture even if I really just want to do a close reading and search for internal meanings. I'm wary of any topic that tyrannically compels me to discuss something, which makes me wary of tackling WAR even though I enjoy it and making connections across the modes deployed by Warhammer.
* Finally there is the option of just doing a critically-informed reading of something like Warcraft III (or Dawn of War or anything really). This may seem like a trite fallback but a serious critical reading would do a lot of the things I need it to. First, it would afford me the opportunity to make the case for video games as serious cultural production that ought to be considered critically
(even apart from the politically tedious meta-concerns like "is GTA making people violent" or whatever). Second, the fact that a game is being critiqued at all is a novelty that is worthy of exploration. As far as I know - and I've done a lot of searching, but I may be mistaken - there is nothing out there that critiques video games in a scholarly way except as generic media artifacts in larger discussions of culture. No one discusses Warcraft as a Postcolonial and Ecocritical critique of Western hegemony or Warhammer 40K as a post-scientific realist dystopia. There's a tiny bit of soft pop-philosophy about Final Fantasy, but nothing scholarly. Finally, it would still afford me the opportunity to discuss how to read a video game and the ways in which that is distinct from critiquing other kinds of culture (plus, of course, how that distinction is meaningful for whatever close reading I do).
As generic as it sounds, I think a basic close reading would still be innovative and meritorious just because of its novelty here.
More ideas to come I'm sure...
not just as stories, but as games and interactive spaces - then one understands that the approach would be very different. The main difference lies in how the community interacts with the text. Dawn of War is an RTS game and a novel, but W:AR is an MMO. The dynamics for how an audience interacts with a Massively Multiplayer Online game are unique and touch on a range of other audience-studies issues. So if I did Warhammer, I'd still do the multi-modal inter-textual reading, but it would also necessarily focus more on audience receptions, interpretations, and interactions with the text and the meta-text (like forums, websites, conventions and so forth). It's definitely possible and probably valuable to tackle issues of audience in the MMO and how that relates to Convergence Culture, but it's just a much different project I think than dealing with Convergence itself and trying to read video games from that.In fact, the MMO experience is different enough that I wonder if perhaps the MMO is somehow different in kind from other games because of the "massively multiplayer" aspect. The MMO facet practically forces one to discuss issues of audience and mass culture even if I really just want to do a close reading and search for internal meanings. I'm wary of any topic that tyrannically compels me to discuss something, which makes me wary of tackling WAR even though I enjoy it and making connections across the modes deployed by Warhammer.
* Finally there is the option of just doing a critically-informed reading of something like Warcraft III (or Dawn of War or anything really). This may seem like a trite fallback but a serious critical reading would do a lot of the things I need it to. First, it would afford me the opportunity to make the case for video games as serious cultural production that ought to be considered critically
(even apart from the politically tedious meta-concerns like "is GTA making people violent" or whatever). Second, the fact that a game is being critiqued at all is a novelty that is worthy of exploration. As far as I know - and I've done a lot of searching, but I may be mistaken - there is nothing out there that critiques video games in a scholarly way except as generic media artifacts in larger discussions of culture. No one discusses Warcraft as a Postcolonial and Ecocritical critique of Western hegemony or Warhammer 40K as a post-scientific realist dystopia. There's a tiny bit of soft pop-philosophy about Final Fantasy, but nothing scholarly. Finally, it would still afford me the opportunity to discuss how to read a video game and the ways in which that is distinct from critiquing other kinds of culture (plus, of course, how that distinction is meaningful for whatever close reading I do).As generic as it sounds, I think a basic close reading would still be innovative and meritorious just because of its novelty here.
More ideas to come I'm sure...
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