This indeed is an unusual specimen of fan-made artefact—the first one of its kind I ran across thus far. At myspace music there is the
↑Alan Wake 24-Hour Real-Time Online Radio Serial, seemingly brought to us straight from Silver City, Panama: “Alan Wake wakes with amnesia … And the mysteries continue to unravel.” This hardly can be called player-made content, as their are no players of ↑Alan Wake, because the game has not yet been released. After having seen ↵“A Dream within a Dream” in an e-mail to me ↑Bryan Alexander jokingly dubbed this piece of ↑fan machinima produced before the game as “avant-machinima”.
 

It may well be that to certain types of online-communities, certain sets of life-cycles can be attached. For me it’s only possible to jot down the lifecycles of “my tribe”, the MP-modding community, because that’s the only one I am close with over a span of meanwhile four years. So, I can’t tell for sure if my inferences are valid for other communities as well. Tentatively I’d say yes, because modding-communities have an astounding amount of qualities in common. What I can say for sure is, that there is something like an era of the proto-modding-community. In this era the community itself already is manifested in its communal online-infrastructure [for Alan Wake see the bottom of the sidebar to the right, for ↑S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl see ↑Oblivion Lost, especially its ↑mod announcement forum]. But appropriation of the forthcoming game’s universe already has started in this era, too. It manifests itself in a variety of so-called “fan-art”.