SALON: Fandom and Gaming

This salon invites participation from scholars who work within game studies, material culture, transmedia storytelling, and fandom scholarship. As both board and video games have only increased in popularity, this salon seeks to better understand several provisionally theorized ways in which participants and fans engage with the gaming hobby. Scholars have posited the way that gameplay can be a fan practice, while also examining game players as fans themselves. The gameplay-as-fan-practice perspective suggests that players can use gameplay to write alternate histories that obey franchise constraints with non-canonical outcomes. In the realm of board gaming, miniatures-as-toys situates these game tokens as toyetic objects, accessible both within the framework of the game rules, but also as purely ludic objects to be played with, displayed, modified, photographed, and traded, outside of their use as game pieces. These and other intersections between game rules, physical figurines, and transmedia narratives promise productive, cross-disciplinary explorations of a materialized media form.

Participants: Greg Loring-Albright (Drexel University), Jonathon Lundy (Drexel University), Miyoko Conley (University of California, Berkeley), Danielle Hart (Miami University), David Kocik (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) (Paul Booth, moderator)


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