Refractory - finally out

The issue of Refractory that I have been working on with Darshana Jayemanne and Christian McCrea has finall come out.

Enjoy.

Good News

Got accepted last week for the International Symposium on Electronic Arts conference this August in Singapore. Probably I'll be able to go, but it might be during semester so could cause problems. Looks like there could be a crew from Melbourne going also, because Nate, Michael and Christian were all accepted also.

Dean Chan also invited me to be on his panel at the Asian Studies Association of Australia conference in Melbourne next July, the theme of which will be popular culture. Its gonna be refereed (stoked).

The great thing about both of these papers is that they both represent peices of research that I have been struggling to get into the wider sphere for a while now. The ISEA paper got rejected from the space and culture special issue last year and from something else I can't remember, its the one where I look at the difference between free and subscriber services on MMOs.

The ASAA will probably be the one that didn't make it to the Asian Australian Research Network conference last year because of illness, and the Manga conference in Canada in 2006 because no funding.

What Happened to Me?

I don't suppose there is anyone still out there that reads this. But just in case I'm not dead. I've just been really busy.

Highlights:

New job at Deakin University - I'm a Research Fellow in Literacy Education

Book contract with Peter Lang Publishers, it for the Digital Formations Series - MS due in March

Heaps of Publications (see above)

Hundreds of hours playing Nintendo DS, Playstation 2, and Xbox (and a few PC games also)

The blogs staying alive untile I finish my PhD at least.

Accepted

My proposed fibreculture article was accepted for publication:

Open Source Culture: Participatory Culture and the Digital Divide

Henry Jenkins’ recent publications on convergence have focused on the way that the active audience, equipped with the productive and distributive tools of digital technology might transform the waning public sphere in the USA, at the expense of effectively excluding discussion of the transnational and uneven practices of cultural convergence. However, in his work the stakes of convergence culture are clearly established: empowered consumers (potentially) have an active role in transforming – and democratizing – governments and corporations. This article will examine what this emergent politicized form of consumption/production means in the context of the unevenness of global participation in the information economy.

By focusing on the tactics of participation that are deployed in the global ‘South’ through a case study of media practices and consumption in Venezuela this article will demonstrate what is at stake in the shift to a media paradigm of convergence. In particular I will focus on the role that media piracy plays in providing a heterogeneous space of participation outside the news and telecommunications media, which have come under increasingly strict government controls since Hugo Chávez’s 2006 re-election.

To address this precarious participation in global media production, enabled through illegal practices that are disciplined by both local and global forces, I will turn to the work of Néstor García Canclini and George Yúdice on the uneven relationship between consumption and citizenship in order to contest dominant dialogues of piracy. Finally the article will re-examine piracy in the context of open source, in order to argue that to extend the consumer/citizen empowerment of convergence globally the notion of open source must be extended to include hardware, and education, as well as software.

Hunkering down

Its time to get the rest of my PhD out of the way. No commitments for the next six weeks (apart from teaching), so I need to do some good solid writing, so I can have my full draft ready in earli June.

The trip to CSU Dominguez Hills was cool, I still don't understand how I was there for 3 days and was gone from Audtralia for five. Time is confusing, especially when combined with space.

Interesting that no one in the USA has heard of Second Life, or even of America's Army.

The Space and Culture paper that I was proposing with Katarina got rejected.

Space and Culture

Katarina and I sent this one off today for the Space and Culture special edition entitled The Place of Synthetic Worlds....

The Border Politics of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games:
Gaming in the ‘Free’ World

As a notion of place ‘the border’ has been deployed in a number of ways, of particular interest to this article is the way that ‘the border’ has been invoked as a shifting and immaterial boundary, and a metaphor for global mobility and hybridity. In this regard we wish to highlight two aspects of Pablo Vila’s (2000) work: his critique of a homogenous concept of ‘the border’; and his focus on uneven dynamics that borders impose.

The concept of the border will be used in this article to explore the exclusionary boundaries of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), both in regard to access to the games, and of access within the games themselves. This investigation elaborates on the established uneven power dynamic in MMORPGs between the corporate owners of the game, and the players of the game. The aim of the article is to open up the category of players of MMORPGs to explore stratification within, and between, games that is derived from an unevenness of access.

The article will examine the ways that this unevenness stems from economics, technology, and culture through an ethnographic investigation of MMORPG play in Belgrade, Serbia, Melbourne, Australia, and Caracas, Venezuela. The discussion will focus on games popular at all sites: Tibia (CipSoft, 1996), Flyff (AeonSoft, 2004), and Second Life (Linden Labs, 2003). Through an analysis of this empirical data, the notion of the border in relation to MMORPGs will be explored, to argue while this genre of videogames represents a form of international space, that the inequalities and unevenness that characterize the demarcation of borders between states are carried through to the virtual game worlds, replicating and reproducing off-line hierarchies. Of particular interest will be the stakes and status of playing these games for free, vis-à-vis a system that allows people who are free-players and fee-paying subscribes to both play together and co-produce a virtual economy.

References
Vila, P. (2000). Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Also got rejected from a job at University of Texas Austin, that I had forgotten I had applied for.

More Rejections... ...But Some Hope

I got another rejection letter from RMIT, this one was worded very kindly, thanking me for the effort I had made in applying (thanks for noticing guys). I had read their mission statement, and specifically addressed how I could help them achieve their mission.... anyway they wish me luck in my future career, which I can say without sarcasm is kind of them, because no one else has bothered to say that!

Still waiting for a rejection letter from Swinburne, I know that I didn't get the job because my colleague and buddy Christian McCrea got the job. Well done Christian!! Still haven't congradulated him in person, but Swinburne has made a smart move snapping him up.

As for me, I'm of to the US of A for a job interview this week at California State University - Dominguez Hills, in the College of Liberal Arts, Department of Communication. Should be cool, definitely my biggest challenge yet. My mother in law has the whole congregation of her church in Caracas praying for me - is good to have people rooting for you thats for sure.