fanhackers:

When building a spear, what matters: you, building or the spear?

At the recent FSNNA conference (were you there? Did we meet? If you’ve been there, the panel recordings and the discussion space is still available for a week.), Katherine Crighton, Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo introduced an online game where you can create new fanworks for your blorbo for the newest fannish sensation: Blow the Man Down. The catch is, this fannish sensation is not a TV show. The story is reverse engineered through the fanworks created for it, but in a sense, it doesn’t exist. Your blorbo also doesn’t exist. My blorbo is real cool, though, their name is Bogdán.

When it comes to fannish creation, there are some key theories to reference. Participatory culture is one, we also talk about gift economy, affective labor; can they possibly explain why we are able to act fannishly when there isn’t even a canon to be fans of? Are we experiencing real feelings for a fake blorbo because we participated in their creation, committing to this silly man? Or is it because of the nature of the work, we used fannish practices to create them, which is inherently affective? Or is it, as the presentation already points out, due to the spear theory: we build our blorbo by piercing many blorbos through and that creates our type? I dare you; play the game and let us discuss our experiences. Or if you’ve ever gonched, what did you think of it?

Awesome little write up of a project I did with coauthors Dr. Naomi Jacobs (Lancaster University) and Shivhan Szabo (York University in Toronto)!

(I, meanwhile, was representing the Interactive Media and Game Design program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where I’m currently pursuing my MFA– which is a post for a whole other day.)

We presented at the Fan Studies Network North America 2023 panel discussion “Transmedia and Remediation”. Our talk in particular “Faking and Re-Making: The Use of Emotional Responses and Creative Resonances in Communal Multimedia Storytelling”, described the imaginary works Goncharov (a fake mafia movie that developed organically through meme culture) and Blow the Man Down (a fake pirate TV show that was intentionally developed and managed as part of a larger ARG), both of which do not exist but nevertheless have developed real fandoms around very scant “canon” details. By studying the development of these fandoms in parallel, we outlined a replicable method for encouraging audiences to collaboratively self-create their own canon, resulting in authentic emotional investment and fan engagement in nonexistent media.

Our talk was accompanied by a multimedia poster in the form of a text-adventure browser game set in the nonexistent Blow the Man Down universe: Building the Spear: a demonstration in faking and re-making real feelings for an imaginary work.

By playing a pirate trying to regain lost memories of their captain and crew, the audience can experience one method for inviting collaborative play and fan development of an imaginary work. Building the Spear is available free to play; players are welcome to visit a linked slideshow version of the FSNNA presentation, read a more in-depth introduction to the principles being demonstrated, or skip directly to the game, after which they are highly encouraged to publicly share their final results and further expand a fake work’s real fandom.

My new-canon pirate blorbo? I thought you’d never ask: