Memes, Microcultures, & 2D Chicks

alexleavitt

Hey all,

I'm the presenter of the Memes, Microcultures, & 2D Chicks: Our Future in the Otaku Gamer panel. I had a great time talking on Saturday, and I'm hoping that people got pictures or video of the panel. Please post links! Or, if you have any feedback (praise or hate, your choice), please post it to the thread!

Thank you to everyone that came by to listen!

Alex

ystael

I enjoyed your talk, but I didn't feel like you made your thesis clear. Is your core contention that the North American gamer community does not form "creative" subcultures (centered around creation of fan works extending the characters and settings provided by the original game) to the same extent that the Japanese gamer community does?

alexleavitt

ystael wrote: »

Is your core contention that the North American gamer community does not form "creative" subcultures (centered around creation of fan works extending the characters and settings provided by the original game) to the same extent that the Japanese gamer community does?

I think it's fairly obvious that American and Japanese media subcultures do not resemble each other much at all, mainly because the industry around which they form is so different. Of course, there are similarities: in a way, the fandoms that have organized around films such as Lord of the Rings or Star Wars and who have been creating their own works for decades parallel those around Japanese franchises like Touhou and Vocaloid. The end of my presentation was a bit vague, but I wanted to suggest that the origins of the franchises like Touhou (game) and Vocaloid (software) are limited to such an extent that the fandoms can produce secondary material that extends these original media. However, if we try to apply that equation to the American gaming industry, it seems that most games cater to the interactivity that American gamers want (in other words, the fans aren't striving to get more out of the original media).

What I would like to emphasize, though, is that American fans that participate in video game culture can imitate Japanese fandoms in taking advantage of online platforms like YouTube to build better fan networks, not just networks between fans, but networks of media that will lead fans to embrace historical or peripheral pieces of the American game culture.

To apply the memetic-evolutionary concept to this network idea, I could foresee fans uploading more gameplay content to YouTube, especially more content from older games and systems, that will then influence fellow game fans to do the same or at least innovate on the process of sharing gaming experience.