Again those little mosaic-tiles keep falling in place—and the timing is perfect. Just some days ago ↑John Postill confirmed via email that a paper I proposed for the ↑11th biennial conference of the ↑European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) has been accepted for the media anthropology network’s workshop ↑The Rewards of Media. Just one day before gamescares published an ↑interview with Peter Papadopoulos, Remedy’s community manager. Pete is an old friend of mine from the glorious days of Max-Payne modding. Within the online-scene he is better known as ADM, short for “a doomed marine,” of course an allusion to the protagonist of the Doom-series. Have an excerpt from the interview:
It’s a bit of a long story so I’ll try and shorten it as much as I can but it goes back to when I was a regular in the Max Payne community. […] It’s also worth pointing out that the Max Payne community was a great booster for many peoples careers with several members now working at studios such as EA/Dice, Gearbox, Crytek and of course Remedy.
And here is the abstract of my paper called “modding’s rewards”:
Within the transnational technoludic online communities of practice—among which I am doing persistent thick participation since 2002—informal mutual tutelage and training is a core practice. In the case of ‘game modding’ this may well amount to ‘postindustrial unwaged labour.’ But there is another, less negative interpretation. First, the online-communal practices enable the members to live their personal conglomerations of ambiences, sentiments, aesthetics, and narrative content, built from a lifetime of digesting popular culture, and of assimilating its modes of representation into their own conceptions of life. Second, since I presented ‘my online tribe’ at the 2006 workshop of the media anthropology network, more than half of the core-group has crossed the blurry border to professionalism and works in exactly the jobs they envisioned during the early times of the community. By expanding Henry Jenkins’s notion of co-creative media I will collapse this twofoldness of rewards, mythopoeic and economic, into one.
