interview with a doomed marine

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.
Share
  • Post a comment

    Threaded commenting powered by interconnect/it code.