Auran and Trainz

Hi there,

I thought today – after chatting in the tutorial for an hour and a half about Nintendogs, I thought I would talk about something a little more relevant to virtual cultures! Although Nintendogs had a lot to do with proximity and how people in Japan use the game as a virtual replacement for a real pet - I just thought people got a little carried away with the topic!

Moving right along, I just realised that I haven’t made any comments about Dr John Banks’ involvement with Auran as a community moderator for fans of the game Trainz. I think Auran’s encouragement of fans to produce game content is remarkable. Last week in the tutorial, many people in the participatory culture chat room agreed that Auran was just conducting smart business through using fan-created content to enhance their game and revenue intake. We also agreed that whilst some may criticise the initiative as being exploitative and taking advantage of the Trainz fans, at the end of the day even the fans realise that Auran has to function as a commercial enterprise. For example, in the Week 8 lecture, John presented an email a Trainz fan had written to John at Auran, who admitted that whilst he knew Auran was using his creative content to sell the game, his feelings towards such activity were “mixed”. The fan stated: “On one hand I admired the guts to approach a niche market, the concept of customer support, innovative ideas, etc. On the other hand, I thought to see through a thin veil the attempt to exploit the community.”

Once again, I think fan created content is just another great example of participatory culture, or what Marshall (2004, 104) refers to as “…diverse and elaborate ecologies of production.” In the week 3 lecture, John also used to term “indiscrete cultural objects” to describe produser-created content like that developed by fans for Trainz which is characterised as being “open-ended, digitsed, incomplete and part of network flows.” Whilst I think the participatory movement is revolutionary, I have come around to the idea that there are still serious governance implications for such activities involving appropriation, e.g. the stringent End User Licence Agreements for games.

Finally, I would like to finish with a quote that I found by Peter Day in the book Community Informatics: Shaping Computer Mediated Social Relations. I found this quote particularly relevant to current debates we’ve had in KCB201 concerning the “digital divide” being created between rich and poor nations; whether new media technologies shape or determine culture and society; and the open-source ideology which many view as central to participatory cultures:

Powerful techno-economic interests currently shape information society developments. ‘Knowledge economy’ policy makers regard people in terms of their market potential rather than citizens. This consumerist discourse is divisive and fundamentally anti-democratic.” (Day. 2001, 322).

I hope you had fun chatting in the tutorial today – all I can say is that I’m happy that today was our last tutorial because I’m sure the take home exam will be more than challenging! Have a great weekend and I’ll post soon.

Em x

References:
Day, P. 2001. ‘Participating in the information society’, in L. Keeble and B. Loader (Eds) Community Informatics. Shaping Computer-Mediated Social Relations. London and New York: Routledge.

Marshall, D. 2004. New Media Cultures. London: Arnold.