Browsing by Author "Veale KR"

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    Capital, dialogue and community engagement - 'My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic' understood as an alternate reality game
    (Organization for Transformative Works, 15/09/2013) Veale KR
    The experience of engaging with the television show 'My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic' is structurally and affectively analogous to the experience of an alternate reality game. The community presents multiple tiers of engagement in which individual contributions can be recognized; the creators of the show include material with the specific intent that it be taken up by the community but without any control of the way in which it is used, and material created by the community is folded into the text by the creators in a dialogue. The context of the cocreative dialogue that surrounds the show and its community is a good example of both what Paul Booth identifies as a digi-gratis economy and the forensic fandom used by Jason Mittell to understand community engagement and response to 'Lost.'
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    Friendship isn’t an emotion fucknuts: Manipulating affective materiality to shape the experience of Homestuck’s story
    (SAGE Publications, 20/06/2017) Veale KR
    Homestuck is a textual and experiential chameleon that manipulates its own structure to shape the audience’s affective experience of the story by mimicking not just the storytelling techniques of other media forms, but their modes of engagement as well. This article introduces terminology to illustrate how and why the online serial Homestuck qualifies as a distinctive form of storytelling. I introduce the term transmodal engagement to illustrate how Homestuck uses the affective, experiential affordances of different media forms to sculpt and shape the experience of the text in completely different ways to ‘transmedia’ storytelling. The second term this article introduces is metamedia storytelling, which describes how the audience’s familiarity with storytelling across multiple media forms can be used to manipulate their experience of fiction. Homestuck deploys metamedia storytelling to continually destabilise the reader’s understanding of the text and their investments in the storyworld by forcing re-evaluations of not just what is happening, but what kind of mediated relationship the readers have with the content of the story.
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    Gone home, and the power of affective nostalgia
    (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 9/08/2017) Veale KR
    Gone Home is a videogame that uses storytelling specific to the ‘affective materiality’ of its medium to produce a sense of responsibility for the player, reinforcing their affective investment in the storyworld. The game employs this affective materiality for political ends – to create empathy for the queer sister of its protagonist – by placing it within a recent but unsympathetic historical moment. Gone Home understands nostalgia as a way to recognise the positive and negative elements of the past, and then reflect on them in order to take action for a better future. It uses nostalgia in this mode to highlight the differences in how progressive the western world is in treating LGBTQIA+ youth: through their own decisions, the player gets to know two young women as they come to terms with their sexuality and identities against a backdrop that is even less welcoming to difference than today. The historical and political engagement of the videogame resonates with attempts by museums ‘to educate or otherwise influence how people understand and use the past to understand themselves and others’, through embracing the links between recollection, affect, emotion and empathy.
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    Interactive cinema is an oxymoron, but may not always be
    (Game Studies, 30/09/2012) Veale KR
    "Interactive Cinema" is a term that has been associated with videogames within historical media discourse, particularly since the early nineties due to the proliferation of CD-ROM technology. It is also a fundamental misnomer, since the processes of experiential engagement presented by the textual structures of videogames and cinema are mutually exclusive. The experience of cinematic texts is defined, in part, by the audience's lack of ability to alter events unfolding within the film's diegesis. In comparison, the experience of videogames is tied inextricably to the player's investment and involvement within the game's textual diegesis, and within a Heideggerian world-of-concern. However, there has been a recent development that suggests a bridge between these two structures: texts which are less defined by their ludic qualities than by a set structure - but where the affective qualities of the experience rely entirely on the direct involvement of the person engaging with the text. These are a storytelling form which are neither "played" or "watched," and it may be that "interactive cinema" is an appropriate way of conceptualising these experiences.