PAX East Update: Officially Chosen as a Panelist!

Posted on 25 January 2010 by Alex Leavitt

As of last week, I’m happy to say that I’ve been officially chosen to speak at PAX East.

I’ll be talking about Internet memes, niche video games, and really bad imitations of foreign food in Japan (yep, the last one does tie in). Check out the panel description below.

Memes, Microcultures, and 2D Chicks: Our Future in the Otaku Gamer
Saturday 27 March 2010, 1:30 pm, Wyvern Theatre (Hynes Convention Center, Boston, MA)

A singing idol who doesn’t exist. Perverted text adventures boasting dozens of female prizes. And a popular, anime-tized evolution of the classic Space Invaders shooter that has spawned a global fandom. Japan’s subcultural players are obsessed with games that, well, aren’t actually about the gaming. Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) explains how a new generation of entertainment is succeeding in a market which chooses to de-emphasize the games in favor of the characters. And as the Japanese fans influence the industry through their own amateur initiatives, what will the future of American gaming hold when online fandoms adopt similar appetites?

PAX East Panel Submissions

Posted on 11 January 2010 by Alex Leavitt

If you’re awesome and in Boston, MA from March 26th to 28th, 2010, you’ll obviously be attending Penny Arcade Expo: East!

Today is the deadline for panel submissions, and last night I sent in three presentations that will hopefully make it onto the schedule in a few months. Check them out below!

1) Memes, Microcultures, and 2D Chicks: Our Future in the Otaku Gamer

2) Exploring International Geek Cultures Through Games

Even in the era of Internet forums and online gaming communities, our understanding of how and why geeks come together through games is pretty pathetic. From Europe to Asia to America, this panel takes a look at the technological environment in which gamers grew up and the transnational space in which geeks play today. Join Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) as he moderates a discussion between Philip Tan (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab), Prof. Mia Consalvo (Visiting Professor, MIT), and Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara (GAMBIT) on the modern convergence and recurrent differences of the national geek factions that make up the global gaming ecosystem.

3) Trolling the Tubes: Culture Hacking Through Online Gaming

Thousands of Internet users cultivate pixelated gardens in Farmville, raise cyber-chickens in Second Life, and earn livings on Mechanical Turk without realizing that they are changing the face of online culture. From FreeRice to OKCupid, from gold miners in China to 4chan-ers in America, Alex Leavitt (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) takes a look at how online communities are redefining our friends, reorganizing our lives, and restructuring our society into a gaming culture. What will the future of the Internet look like when social networking might mean a social battleground of bots, trolls, and colorful flamewars?

Preparing Thoughts on Evangelion and Media Fandoms

Posted on 3 December 2009 by Alex Leavitt

After spending most of Thanksgiving working on PhD applications (though I still have a couple deadlines left), I’m back to work at the Consortium and ready to blog it up over here at the Department of Alchemy. Alongside all of these applications, it’s time to begin preparing other applications and abstracts for next year’s academic conferences and fan conventions. Last year, I had an excellent time traveling down to New Orleans for the Popular Culture Association national conference, where I spoke about the discourse surrounding otaku identity. This year, the PCA conference is being hosted in St. Louis, MO, but it’s also sandwiched between PAX East and Anime Boston. Regardless of whether or not I can attend in the spring, I submitted the below proposal to the Asian Popular Culture track, which was readily accepted. If I attend in person or if I Skype in to the panel, I’ll be relating most of my secondary research from the Consortium on transmedia and fandom to the Evangelion franchise in Japan and America.

From Narrative to Character: Transmedia, Emotional Economies, and the Success of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Hideaki Anno and Studio Gainax’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” has been heralded as one of the most influential Japanese animations in the history of the medium. Met with wild success among Japanese otaku after its premiere in 1995/96, Evangelion strangely also became a media phenomenon among the general public, particularly following Eiji Otsuka’s criticism of the series in the Mainichi Daily News.

Even after the series ended in 1996, Neon Genesis Evangelion continued to remain a key franchise in the otaku community. Beginning with toys and video games and branching out to pachinko machines and cell phones, Evangelion’s narrative extends well beyond Anno’s original “text.” However, it is in these extensions where Evangelion’s success emerges.

This paper argues that the emotional economies present between fans, narrative, and character drive Neon Genesis Evangelion’s transmedia success. The emotional connection that fans establish between the original story and the stories they create fuel this fan-produced narrative that underlies cosplay, galge (female character-driven video games), and the moé phenomenon.

This paper also explores questions posed by the most recent developments in the Evangelion franchise: the quartet of movies (of which Evangelion 1.0 and 2.0 have already premiered in Japan). Although these movies are clearly an adaptation of the original narrative, they also represent an instance of transmedia storytelling that provides new perspectives to a previously-built world. How does this conflict between adaptation and transmedia storytelling affect the comprehension of the Evangelion narrative for a new generation of fans? Is the emotional economy regenerated or merely prolonged? And how can we better understand the relationship between fans and media by examining the Evangelion franchise as in evolves before our eyes?