Here are some of the answers we got to the Fandom questionnaire in our workshop. If you recall we asked three questions. What are you a fan of? What is the biggest argument you’ve had with fellow fans? What is the biggest argument you’ve had with non-fans?
Fan Of: The Cure. Fan Argument: A friend assured me that the song “Shake Dog Shake” was about excommunication, because backwards it sounds like “EX GOD EX”. Non-Fan Argument: Trying to convince a friend from Morocco that Killing An Arab is not a racist song, but based on The Stranger by Camus.
Fan Of: Nottingham Forest. Fan Argument: How much can we spend, on who, without going bust! Non-Fan Argument: Football is for chavs - discuss!
Fan Of: Scandinavian crime dramas on TV (in the original language!) Fan Argument: What makes the Scandinavian versions better than the English versions? Who dunnit? Non-Fan Argument: I don’t have a better thing to do on a Saturday night!
Fan Of: The Boston Red Sox. Fan Argument: Whether Johnny Dawson is a traitor or not. Non-Fan Argument: Whether baseball is worth getting excited about.
More tomorrow…
As promised, here’s Nick talking about the whys and wherefores of the gaming session.
The aim of the gaming session was to demonstrate that even in a restricted rule-bound system there is still plenty of room to be innovative and think about how to solve problems in original ways. The use of this to research is that we are often charged with coming up with original insights or ideas with limitations regarding what we can and can’t do.
Much of the fun of gaming in general, but particularly role-playing games, stems from the fact that as a player you are restricted in terms of what you can do by the rules, yet by thinking imaginatively you can find ways round problems that the rules did not foresee. So for example when the players decided that they were going to persuade Furry the Werewolf to befriend the Troll, they came up with a solution that was within the rules of the game but that was unexpected and clever, much clever in fact than just attacking and killing Furry.
This is literally game-changing stuff and it’s a great way to teach yourself how to think creatively without getting too carried away and coming up with something too over the top. And this is something that I think the Nerduous Circle can be used for more generally in research - developing original ways to do things within restricted options and also creating hypothetical rules for new ideas in order to test whether or not they might work.
Nerds are constantly trying to ground the fantastic in systems and elaborate systems by attempting to make them more fantastic, we can borrow these ideas for our research too.
The final section of the session looked at memes. Not so much in their strict scientific definition - Richard Dawkins’ original conception of memes as the idea version of a gene - but in the colloquial sense in which they’ve become the web’s native artform: small packages of content, quickly transmissible and mutation-friendly.
I talked about how internet memes tended to involve a combination of a formal shell and personalised content. The content mutates very rapidly. The shell mutates more slowly, though it does change over time, often becoming simpler. In the example we looked at, the now entirely mainstream “Keep Calm And Carry On” meme, the shell ends up simply as being a layout, a font, and the word “and” between two elements. Even any of these elements may yet be subject to change and simplification. An understanding of this dynamic is very useful if you’re thinking about brands and communications: certainly you should appreciate the distinction between these fast-breeding creatures and the more static forms of spreadable content (which, annoyingly for some, are often called “virals”)
The workshop component of this was to create a “research meme” using the ‘Keep Calm’ format, and I’ll be posting a selection of these up too - they were really good!
In the second section of the workshop, we played a brief 15-minute role-playing game - refereed by Nick. This was knockabout fun with a serious purpose, which I’ll get Nick to blog about and explain! But what I took from it was this:
First, it was an opportunity to see nerdery in action - the self-conscious mastery of a fictional continuum. The idea was to give people an opportunity to “think like a nerd” for a short period.
Second - and here’s the research relevance! - presenting problems in game terms makes people more likely to come up with creative solutions. Nick hit the players with a troll and a werewolf, and players spent much of the short session trying to persuade the latter to befriend the former.
The Nerdtopia! workshop involved three main sections - on fandom, on gaming and on memes.
In the fandom section, I talked about the shift in concepts of fandom from the idea that it’s a pathological condition - fans as essentially damaged obsessives - to the idea that it’s a rich participatory culture. For the workshop’s purposes I focused on three areas of fan activity:
- Canon: defining what gets to be part of the fandom
- Creativity: creative activity around the object of the fandom - art, fiction, role-playing, criticism, creating fan resources etc.
- Conflict: arguments with fans and non-fans
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This blog is a collection of outputs, resources, and random stuff related to Nick Gadsby and Tom Ewing’s Nerdtopia! workshop, as presented to 35 or so people at the MRS Research 2011. If you were at the workshop, you should find this useful. If you weren’t, here’s a quick summary of the arguments…
The circle of nerdery. Nick’s theory on the semiotics of nerdery is that nerddom is based on applying rationality to the irrational and irrationality to the rational in a “nerduous circle”. So, for instance, tabletop RPGs typically apply complex rule systems to a fantastical world, while at the same time the fantastical-ness tempers the rigour of the rules.
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