I’ve Seen the Lite

Posted on Posted in Games

Looking at the travel schedule detailed in that last post, I’m starting to think it’s about time to pick up a Nintendo DS Lite. I’m thinking this not just because of time spent on the plane, but because that seems to be a major method of interaction between people at certain cons. At PAX in particular, people whiled away time between events, at boring panels, and sitting in lines, playing DS games on Wi-Fi. So many people were playing, in fact, that the wireless connection started lagging. A friend of mine commented that it was the first time he’d ever seen people actually using Pictochat. A fellow I met at South by Southwest, meanwhile, realized he was seated on the plane with a fellow SXSW-attending “nerd buddy” when they both pulled out DS’s (and subsequently played together).

I wonder, though, how people play with handheld systems when not attending special events. I once saw a guy on a bus here in Philly on a DS, and I once saw a woman in an arcade playing on a PSP while a couple of her friends played pool nearby, but that’s about it for my actual sightings in the wild, as it were. I’m interested in DS Buttons, a site that sells little pin-on buttons to invite the world to play DS with you, but I have no idea how often that actually leads to interaction with strangers.

Video gaming may have a reputation for discouraging social behavior, but the DS—which has dominated video game sales numbers for some time—may be on the road to being the most successful (non-PC) gaming system ever. Interesting that this title could be bestowed upon a handheld device rather than the consoles with massive processing power that the industry has pushed toward for so long.

Which Blogs and Cons Should I Be Visiting?

Posted on Posted in Comics, Computers, Conventions, Games, Movies, Television3 Comments

As of now, my dissertation will probably be focusing on some of the various cultures surrounding computers, video games, comics, and sci-fi TV/film. I’ve definitely had interviews (or have them lined up) with appropriate people for these topics, but I need to stay more continually plugged in to these industries and cultures than a few interviews allow for. That means attending some conventions and following some blogs, hopefully including the best trafficked of each.

In terms of cons, I’ve already attended the Penny Arcade Expo, the San Diego Comic Con International, the Big Apple Con, the Come Out and Play Festival (where I shot a short movie), and the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (no movies or music for me.) Depending on how certain things shake down, my travel plans for this year potentially include Wizardworld Philly (June), another trip to San Diego for Comic Con (July), Defcon in Vegas (August), the Tokyo Game Show (September), and the Small Press Expo (October). If some of that falls through and I could actually afford to go to PAX again, that’s another possibility. (I’ll also be going back and forth to Boston to visit friends and family, heading to San Francisco in May for the International Communication Association 2007 Conference, and doing research with Annenberg’s Summerculture program in Lisbon, Portugal for about half of July.)

As for web sites, I regularly sift through feeds from Joystiq, Kotaku, Game Politics, The Comics Reporter, and a number of sites maintained by academics I admire, such as Henry Jenkins’s Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Nancy Baym’s Online Fandom, and Jane McGonigal’s Avant Game. More recently, I picked up the feed for Slashdot, plus subscriptions to the print editions of Wired and Geek Monthly. I occasionally visit a number of other sites, including The Escapist, Journalista, and MacUser. (And that’s all on top of the design sites, traditional news sites, and web comics, which I won’t even get into here.)

Clearly, though, I’ve been more deeply involved with the comic book and video game scenes than the others. So I turn to you: got any suggestions for cons and web sites I should visit to get a better angle on what’s geeky about TV, film, and/or computer culture and industry?

Getting Into The Spirit

Posted on Posted in School Culture1 Comment

I keep coming across web sites today with funny April Fools’ Day posts, but I feel that my own site is too new to blatantly lie to readers and get away with it. (Plus, the last time I pulled off an April Fools’ joke, I got punched pretty hard. That is what you get for pretending to be descended from British royalty, I guess.)

Keeping with the spirit of the day and this site, though, I figured now would be as good a time as any to link to the The MIT Hack Gallery—and to express how impressed I am that the university actually gave a subdomain to a page chronicling practical jokes. Many of the hacks listed in the chronological index lack visuals, sadly, so allow me to link to a site that features some images of a recent favorite of mine.

Announcing Nerd Quarterly

Posted on Posted in Defining Geekdom1 Comment

Geek Monthly has some news announcements befitting today’s date, such as the announcement of a new target demographic:

Said Bond, “We realized Geek was too cool for a whole segment of our potential audience and we want to reach those that are offended by the word geek and are still living in their parents basements and haven’t kissed a girl.

Side note: during my interviews and convention visits, I was fascinated how frequently people make this geek/nerd distinction (though some define it the other way around).

“I Prefer Looking at Drawings”

Posted on Posted in Comics

Over at Design Observer, Dan Nadel offers some harsh criticism of the graphic design world based on a particular exhibition, calling its “selections in graphics and pop culture […] conservative and long out-of-date.” He calls one set of works “blatant Chris Ware rip-offs” and suggests some works that would better represent “current trends in graphic visual culture,” such as Matt Brinkman’s posters and Kramers Ergot. He also notes that the history of design and visual culture should include 2000 AD and other illustration-oriented publications.

Some of the graphic designers who read Design Observer, of course, are less than happy to be accused of being part of an insular world. One suggests that an alternate title for the piece could be “I prefer looking at drawings,” which doesn’t seem entirely unfair: before reading this article, I was familiar with Nadel mostly for his writing on comics in Print and The Gansfeld, and his suggestions here are closely connected to movements in art comics.

Part of what I find really interesting about this, though, is that this doesn’t fit so neatly into the classic story of “the mainstream” ignoring the beleaguered “junk medium.” Browse around some design sites, and it becomes pretty clear that graphic designers are similarly lamenting that they’re ignored by “the mainstream.” You even hear some of the same discussions going on at design conferences that you hear at comic cons, with people debating the relative merits of doing work that is more challenging versus work that encourages more widespread “literacy.”

I wonder, though, if comics creators are becoming more design literate through the influence of artists like Chris Ware and the mini-comics and web comics scenes, while the art and design worlds might still need to brush up on their knowledge of comics. In Design Literacy, Steven Heller relates how he had to work hard to get the rest of the judges on the Chrysler Award panel to even consider that Gary Panter’s work is more than just funny drawings. That was awhile ago—but if Nadel’s comments are indicative of anything besides his personal preferences or that particular exhibition, perhaps not much has changed.

What Are We Working On?

Posted on Posted in Research2 Comments

Before I launch into links, commentary, and dissertation-related musings, I figured it might be helpful (for you and me both) to give a quick overview of what I’ve been doing that’s relevant to this blog.

Comics stuff: I wrote a few course papers on comics in my first couple years at Annenberg. The first two were basically two parts of the same argument, analyzing creators’ and fans efforts to save what many consider a threatened industry and medium, though visual experimentation and grassroots activism, respectively. I also wrote a paper about political cartooning that needs a major overhaul before I can do anything with it. I’m hoping to clean up the first two a bit and submit them for publication somewhere this summer.

Video game stuff: Again, two of my course papers on video game papers were covering different aspects of the same larger argument. One focused on state legislatures’ attempts to regulate the sale of games to minors, and the other focused on legislative and other efforts to overhaul the ESRB. I’ve attempted to blend these into one paper to submit soon to a new academic journal. I’m also presenting a paper about gameplay and interaction in arcades this May at ICA. Now that my coursework is complete, I’m also working on a couple of video game papers on the side, including one about narrative structure and another about visual aesthetics. I’ll probably post some thoughts here in the coming weeks.

General geek stuff: I wrote a course paper on geek culture and markets in the fall semester of 2005 which was too large in scope for a single paper. I revised the paper for a 2006 summer project after conducting additional interviews at the San Diego Comic Con and the Penny Arcade Expo. (That was the version of the paper I recently sent out to my interviewees.) Since then, I have been working on a paper on geeky t-shirts for an upcoming conference at MIT (which I’ll be sure to link to it from here when they post it on their site). I’m also currently working on my dissertation proposal, which I’m sure I’ll be blogging about in greater detail soon. This is the document where I explain why this project is relevant, how it fits into existing academic literature, and how I’m going to go about studying it.

Other stuff: I wrote a couple papers on concepts of media literacy that I’ll have to do something with. I hear various iterations of “media literacies” applied to geeky media (computer literacy, comics literacy, etc.) that I suspect I’ll have to address this in my dissertation somehow.

I’m also curious to hear what anyone on this site may be working on, hence the title above. So, whenever you happen to stumble across this post, I welcome you to comment about whatever academic, professional, or personal projects you feel like sharing.

Site Design More Or Less Complete

Posted on Posted in Site Maintenance3 Comments

Well, here it is: I designed the logo yesterday afternoon in Adobe Illustrator, and have spent all my time since then scraping at the White As Milk WordPress theme until the colors, sizes, and layout were closer to what I had in mind. I was a computer science major once upon a time, but it’s been a very long while since I had to muck with any code, so please let me know if I mangled the theme so badly that something actually stopped functioning.

The title above says “More or Less Complete” because some odd CSS inconsistency is making the text on Archive pages start lower down, and I have to manually add the title. It’s six in the morning, though, so perhaps this is something that can be revisited tomorrow. I welcome you to send suggestions if you have any. (Update: Now that I have two posts I realize that there was extra space left at the top for links to adjacent posts. I still wonder how the Archive page is supposed to line up with the others, though.)

Welcome and Introduction

Posted on Posted in Miscellanea2 Comments

Thanks for visiting Geek Studies. I’m Jason Tocci, a grad student in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. For my doctoral dissertation, I’m doing a study on “geek” culture—the media use, social identity, and market formations of those who self-identify or are typically considered by others as geeks, nerds, dorks, and so on.

Why study geeks? Well, I started grad school to study comic art and visual communication, then moved into studying video games. I started noticing a common thread in some of my projects on comics and games, and I decided to start thinking about it in terms of geek culture when a friend gave me a t-shirt that said “Han Shot First.” The shirt features a sci-fi movie reference, is produced by an online comic artist whose strip is about video games, and is being distributed through an online store owned by a company related to open source technology. Somehow, all of this is marketed and claimed by fans themselves under a word that some consider an insult and others consider a badge of pride. What it means to be a geek is changing slowly, and these changes reveal interesting dynamics in the way communities work and media are used.

Ever since I started researching this as a course paper over a year ago, most of my interviewees have expressed interest in being kept up to date with how the project is going. It can be hard to coordinate that sort of thing via email, as I learned, though a couple of my interviewees suggested that I start up a web page to help keep people updated on my progress and solicit feedback. Considering that my subject group is known for its tech savvy and user participation, I’m hoping this site will help to produce a more fully considered study of geek culture. Thanks go to my thoughtful (anonymous) interviewees for setting me in this direction.

If I were to update here only to post new revisions and to self-promote, I suspect it would get boring pretty fast for all parties involved. In addition to occasionally soliciting feedback on papers, then, my plan is to post the links here that I’d otherwise just be emailing myself for later reference. I’ll also write up observations and ideas that may be the seeds for chapters or papers related to games, comics, technology, and so on.

Please feel free to comment, lurk, or email directly to jtocci [at] asc.upenn.edu.