Welcoming everyone to the session "Materiality & Liveness"

Talking about WWE and the impact of it being termed an "essential business" during COVID shutdowns

Professional wrestling bridges the gap between sports & entertainment

When both entertainment & sports were shut down, WWE was still available with both athletics and storytelling and thus the potential to appeal to fans of both sports and media.

Lucas's argument: WWE didn't have live audiences during shutdown like they usually do. They had to have a national audience to stay open for working, but only at facilities closed to the public.

WWE met both criteria when most other sports couldn't.

WWE moved toward "cinematic matches" - "like an extended version of a video game cutscene" - wrestlers in story-specific environment with editing, effects, and supernatural elements.

Playful Nostalgia: (Re)creating Video Game Spaces as Mods

Nostalgia for 3D platformer video games from the late 90s/early 00s like Super Mario 64, Sonic Adventure. Newer games are emulating (but not, y'know, ~emulating~) the older games.

Marketing and branding include a pitch toward nostalgia: "It's just like N64" "It's just like the Gamecube"

How do players take up this nostalgia themselves? For example, players create environments from old games in newer video games - e.g. creating an area from Super Mario Sunshine in A Hat in Time

We aren't limited to a single mod, so you could play in A Hat in Time, a Sonic Adventure level, with Sora from Kingdom Hearts as your player, riding a Kart from Mario Kart Double Dash.

Factors that influence textual meaning: paratexts, plays, fan-made histories, "mods as simulacra"

"Player-made mods construct nostalgia through remediation and play"

Talking about authorship in TRPGs (!!! calling @theroguesenna & @friede)

Looking at changes in D&D and other TRPGs related to race.

Summer 2021 was the #SummerofAabria when Abria Iyengar was guest DM on multiple actual play shows

AP has often been associated with the creation of a single DM but when Iyengar's work raised the question: how does authorship change when you have a guest DM? Who has authority?

Now notions of canonicity are taking root in actual play. How do TRPGs exist as both a transformative and an original work?

DMs like Iyengar can use their work to critique traditional depictions in fantasy.

The cultural afterlife of plastic toys and how they're curated and collected online now

Fans have to make consequential decisions about material objects (collectable toys) based on digital images

"attachments and affects can be complicated when realizing that what arrived in your mailbox was not exactly what you bought online"

Buyers read the materiality through images: What quality is the plastic? How much has it been damaged? Is it authentic? Is the blister packaging still attached?

During COVID, there's been a boom in the fan economy of vintage collecting.

A lot of collectors have liquidated their collections because they didn't have enough income during COVID.

The Japanese Yen to the dollar is at a 32 year low, so lots of Japanese collectors are liquidating them and selling to buyers overseas (mostly in America).

These collectors then only have immaterial access to their collections - images and memories.

There are important distinctions between player-made mods and official re-releases. There's more freedom to mix-and-match. Legality is an interesting question. Mods aren't strict emulations (in the code sense).

Court case in 2016 found you can't copyright ALL of a game. For example, you can't copyright game mechanics. Player-made mods do give players a sense of ownership.

People get introduced to older "texts" (video games) through these mods - e.g. you play an area in A Hat in Time, and decide to then go explore the game it's originally from.

Reproducing a cartridge like Limited Run games does introduces a new materiality that's different from mods. The gatekeepers are different: purchase vs. download from fansite.

Players of D&D often have a strong intertextual awareness before they even sit down at the table, usually have engaged deeply with fantasy through literature, film, video games.

There's often either a dissatisfaction with or true love of fantasy media that the player brings to the table and uses as inspiration for their character.

If the rules are dissatisfying/frustrating (e.g. I want to play as a dark elf and it's wrong of the rules to penalize me for that), this is where homebrew comes in. This leads to players & DMs bring worldview to the game.

based on personal experience, "play seems to become more valued as you have less recreational time." When work happens at home during lockdown, it can feel like all of life is work so

Additionally, the interpersonal aspect adds extra value. For example, RPing just hanging out in a pub became a fantasy it was valuable to play out.

Rules can give real-world obstacles a clear stat block and make it possible to fight these things in a really satisfying way.

Unlicensed toys also became part of the market and are often more highly valued by collectors than official, licensed ones.

Beginning Turn On, Tune In, Get Out: Rethinking Escapism and Domestic Spectatorship

articulates the need for a theory of escapism, specifically as respite

has never felt the need to get out more than the past few years but where is there to go?

Theory: escapism as a spectatorial mode, one way viewers interpolate cultural objects

"Escapism is a desire that viewers bring to media irrespective of its genre, spectacle, exhibition context, or reception culture"

Viewers bring escapism, not vice versa.

Critics call things "escapist" when they think media's artistic merit doesn't align with its popularity

Escapism is frequently deployed in reference to media that has large fan communities

Historicizing the term "escapist," which was coined in the 1930s. (Benson-Allott is including a lot of detail so look out for her book on this topic later.)

"Escapism" is used both to argue that art should uphold morals AND that art doesn't need to engage with contemporary issues.

"Escapist" is used by critics to indicate a disconnect between a piece of art and themselves.

Previous work (by only 2 scholars) looks at escapism and whose pleasure is marginalized.

Others have focused on genre but not looked at how or why viewers engage in escapism.

As a viewer's sensibility changes, the viewer needs different escape.

If different types of movies can provide escape in a shared geocultural moment, then escapism can't be located in a particular piece of media or genre.

Escape from what? Not necessarily about a change of locale. "If it were, all fantasy films would supply escape to all viewers."

"Escape may be hard to achieve, but it is not site-specific."

Lots of talk here about how what we're escaping is being ourselves, which makes me think about the Daniel Tiger song: "You can change your hair or what you wear but no matter what you do, you're still you."

"Because pleasure is a process, it represents an escap-ing, rather than an escape."

"It cannot be an end, because it ends."

We can find escapism in media that acknowledges inequity and injustice.

"Desiring escape is not the same as desiring oblivion or obliviousness..."

Seriously this work is super rich and I can't possibly capture it all in a Twitter thread.

Escape as ex-cendance: getting out so you can go back

Next session: Fandom During/After COVID

“Reaching Fans Through Deeper Interaction: The Case of Concerts Through Games and Interactive Spaces”

4 cases of concerts in games and interactive spaces: Fortnite is mostly a business approach.

Case 2: Adventure Quest 3D: Fan connection through gameplay

Porter Robinson: Secret Spy more about connecting fans through virtual spaces, chat, avatars, VR

Case 4: Concerts organized by Wave. Real-time motion capture. Trying to create interaction between artist and fans.

Key takeaways: new ways for fans to connect, artists found new ways to interact. "What is the impact of the fan persona?"

Talking about how stage musicals in China are thriving while Broadway is not - uses the closing of Phantom of the Opera on Broadway as an example.

First key to success is the introduction of the immersive theater genre. Special environments and audience participation.

Immersive theater's smaller audience size is good during pandemic

2nd key: Embracing idol fandom. Free drawing for idol performer cards. Exploiting fan labor for marketing.

Fan-made souvenirs, fan photography.

Key #3: Let's queer the theatres. All-male cast, cross-dressing, queer-baiting. These all appeal to female gaze. ([@KimberlyHirsh](https://micro.blog/KimberlyHirsh): How is Takarazuka doing? Could be a cool transnational study.)

"the pleasure obtained from face-to-face interaction is irreplaceable"

All previous Eva Liu tweets are from @EvaLiu1996

“Podficcing in the Pandemic” Key terms: Accessibility, Identity, Experience, Creating, Consuming, Socializing

Podfic is fanfiction recorded aloud and shared as audiopods online. Some people never thought of it as accessible while other people, esp with print disability, used it. ([@KimberlyHirsh](https://micro.blog/KimberlyHirsh): like fanfiction audiobooks)

Some fans used time they would otherwise have gone out to socialize to record podfic. Others experienced trauma and/or just felt pandemic didn't give them more time to create.

Listening to human voices made people feel less alone, but people who lost their commute or had more other people at home listened to less podfic.

Podfic community was an important social activity for some participants.

“‘Are We Friends or Opponents?’ Fans’ Relationship Changes from Online To Offline” with Yuhang Zheng

In idol fans pre-COVID there was a hierarchy where offline fans were considered "core fans" and online fans were more peripheral, but as idols moved activities online during COVID-19, this dynamic changed.

More affordable to attend signings, don't have to navigate physical distance

Change of fan space made it more equitable, less hierarchical. Will the old patterns resurface? How do these patterns work in fandoms surrounding fictional works/characters?

with Dina Rasolofoarison: “Where Is roundtables Fandom Acted Out in 2022? An Update on Places of Fan Practices”

inclusive definition of fandom - not just cult media, but specific nations/cultures, cooking, and more

2 dimensions of places: 1. places have functions, 2. places of substitute consumption - driven by restrictions of time, money, or place

There's lots of great conversation happening in this session but I got distracted and am a little overwhelmed, sorry.

Eva talked about my question about Takarazuka, pointing out that while Takarazuka (Japanese all-women musical theater) has a strict division between otokoyaku (performers who always play men) and musumeyaku (performers who always play women) 1/2

...Chinese and South Korean immersive theaters that feature all-male casts might have a performer play a man in one production and a woman in another.