Articles by Christopher L Moore
Researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination and exchange of
public identity. ... more Researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination and exchange of
public identity. One starting point in the process is to look at the production of the
presentation of the self online, which allows for a particularly valuable way of
exploring celebrity and public personalities. In order to advance on this point, this
article examines three emerging and complementary methods of persona studies that
work to capture different elements in the production of public identity. In the following
we provide an introduction to the research currently being generated using three
intersectional methods as a primer to the study of persona. We first present an
adaptation of interpretative phenomenological analysis for the investigation of online
identity as a means for understanding the strategic and negotiated agency that constructing
a public persona entails. Second, we outline the potential for methods of
social network analysis and data visualisation to contribute to the investigation of
networked structures of public identities, and to further explore the assembly of a
professional persona in the creative and niche paratextual industry roles enabled by
social media. Finally, to explore reputation and relational cultural power we consider
how persona is constituted by connections, adapting prosopography – an historical
method for identifying relational status in a community – to the study of current public
production of the self and relational reputation as a form of cultural field. All of these
techniques are equally useful for the direct study of celebrity persona, and function
dynamically together as means to access the wider dimensions of public persona.
Sometimes a particular concept—a simple term—is the spark to a series of ideas. It might be osten... more Sometimes a particular concept—a simple term—is the spark to a series of ideas. It might be ostentatious and perhaps hubristic that the editors of an issue on persona might imagine that their choice of the term persona has provided this intellectual spark. Fully aware of that risk, we want to announce that it has. The response to the call for papers related to persona was our first sign that something special was being initiated. The sheer number and interdisciplinary breadth of the abstracts and ultimate submissions was evidence that the term ‘persona’ was the catalyst to an explosion of ideas. As the responses flowed into the journal and to us, we became aware of the meme-like qualities of the many interpretations and history of the term, each with its own idiosyncratic coding of patterned similarity.
Convergent media and communication technologies have changed what it means for games to be mobile... more Convergent media and communication technologies have changed what it means for games to be mobile, but play has a mobility of its own that often goes unacknowledged. This article draws together emerging theory from debates in game studies on the separation of the experience of gameplay from the everyday. It examines the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’ and analyses how play, as a mode of experience, is mobilized across dimensions of hardware and software, extending the functions of games beyond the imagining of designers and manufacturers. The article considers what the mobility of play indicates for the player in the creation and management of identity online in the light of game studies consolidation of the magic circle through Goffman’s Frame Analysis. It sees new opportunities in the play of Zombie Media and the role of digital game artifacts in the presentation of the gamer persona, recasting Benjamin and Baudelaire’s flaˆ neur as the ‘gameur’.
The model of learning best suited to the future may be one which sees learning as the process of ... more The model of learning best suited to the future may be one which sees learning as the process of managing the different kinds of participation an individual might have in complex social systems. Learning capability and engagement is thus dependent on the relationship between an individual identity and social systems. We report on the incorporation of machinima, a Web 2.0 technology, as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative project where the focus is not on the mastery of the tools or the acquisition of predetermined knowledge, but on the development of learning engagement. We provide the case study of a pilot project involving students across two Arts disciplines collaborating via the game, World of Warcraft, to produce an animated adaptation of one of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Their contributions were differently assessed according to the pre-existing requirements of their home disciplines. We argue that the assessment in such projects, in conjunction with innovations and experimentation with Web 2.0 technologies, should shift from an emphasis on product to process. We believe that this has a sound pedagogical and theoretical foundation, and also fits better with the increasingly digitalised, unfixed and interdisciplinary world that students will face on graduation.
An iconic staple of the First-Person Shooter genre, Team Fortress 2 , is popular for its chaotic ... more An iconic staple of the First-Person Shooter genre, Team Fortress 2 , is popular for its chaotic action, distinguished by its painterly aesthetics, and made unique by the introduction of hats as rewards for its players. This study investigates the intersection of virtual millinery items, player achievements, user generated content and the implications for online gamer personas as they are connected to the digital distribution platform, Steam. The article examines the iterations of affect involved in the design and play of a game no longer imagined by its publisher, the Valve Corporation, as a distinct commodity but rather a commercial community service.
The sharing of music files has been the focus of a massive struggle between representatives of ma... more The sharing of music files has been the focus of a massive struggle between representatives of major record companies and artists in the music industry, on one side, and peer–to–peer (p2p) file–sharing services and their users, on the other. This struggle can be analysed in terms of tactics used by the two sides, which can be classified into five categories: cover–up versus exposure, devaluation versus validation, interpretation versus alternative interpretation, official channels versus mobilisation, and intimidation versus resistance. It is valuable to understand these tactics because similar ones are likely to be used in ongoing struggles between users of p2p services and representatives of the content industries.
This paper explores the connection between e-waste and obsolescence in the games industry, and ar... more This paper explores the connection between e-waste and obsolescence in the games industry, and argues for the further consideration of consumers as part of the solution to the problem of e-waste. It uses a case study of the PC digital distribution software platform, Steam, to suggest that the digital distribution of games may offer an alternative model to market driven software and hardware obsolescence, and more generally, that such software platforms might be a place to support cultures of consumption that delay rather than promote hardware obsolescence and its inevitability as e-waste. The question is whether there exists a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities (its current 'green' benefit), but also for supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste.
Online computer gamers are a creative bunch, from the mayhem of first-person shooters (FPS) to mo... more Online computer gamers are a creative bunch, from the mayhem of first-person shooters (FPS) to more the social experiences of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), gamers are producing new content for their favourite titles at an amazing rate. This paper explores the rewriting of the boundaries in the production and ownership of intellectual property in the computer games industry. The purpose is to examine the potential for computer game studies to contribute to an understanding of an alternative intellectual property regime known as the commons. This paper will explore how computer games users establish commons-like formations, specific to the digital environment, that extend the confines of current intellectual property rights. It will argue that the productive activities of online gamers are not motivated by the traditional logic of market-based incentives. This represents a new condition which may contribute to a reformation of the privatising enclosure of the intellectual property system.
Keywords: massive multiplayer online role-playing games, intellectual property, commons
Papers by Christopher L Moore
Screenshots are a ubiquitous form of visual communication online and off. They are common across ... more Screenshots are a ubiquitous form of visual communication online and off. They are common across the Web, in print and televisual media, where such images are required to provide evidence of screen activity. Critical analysis of screenshots as digital tools and media objects has rarely been attempted in media studies and the digital humanities, but these disciplines offer powerful and complimentary means for examining the assumptions embedded in their form and function. In this chapter I couple the investigation of screenshots as a convergence of old and new media technologies with the emerging processes for data analysis and network visualization. I seek to augment the hermeneutic and phenomenological interpretation of screenshots by drawing on the new tools for gathering quantitative information and mapping patterns of their circulation online. I take digital game screenshots as the primary subject of inquiry and consider them as a form of virtual photography, examining the role of cybernetics, remediation, and affect in their production and distribution. This study employs the open source network visualization tool NodeXL to expand the theoretical and qualitative investigation by graphing the deployment of game screenshots across two social media sites, Twitter and Flickr. The results presented here demonstrate details of Flickr screenshot tagging practices and the use of screenshots in Twitter profile images as two examples of participation in networked digital game cultures and the individual expression of online persona.
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2011
The model of learning best suited to the future may be one which sees learning as the process of ... more The model of learning best suited to the future may be one which sees learning as the process of managing the different kinds of participation an individual might have in complex social systems. Learning capability and engagement is thus dependent on the relationship between an individual identity and social systems. We report on the incorporation of machinima, a Web 2.0 technology, as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative project where the focus is not on the mastery of the tools or the acquisition of predetermined knowledge, but on the development of learning engagement. We provide the case study of a pilot project involving students across two Arts disciplines collaborating via the game, World of Warcraft, to produce an animated adaptation of one of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Their contributions were differently assessed according to the pre-existing requirements of their home disciplines. We argue that the assessment in such projects, in conjunction with innovations and experimentation with Web 2.0 technologies, should shift from an emphasis on product to process. We believe that this has a sound pedagogical and theoretical foundation, and also fits better with the increasingly digitalised, unfixed and interdisciplinary world that students will face on graduation.
Zombies in the Academy Living Death in Higher Education, 2013
Continuum, 2015
The theme of zombies is topical and provocative, with the potential to appeal to a wide range of ... more The theme of zombies is topical and provocative, with the potential to appeal to a wide range of readers. This book is an engaging call for recognition of the conditions of contemporary humanities research, teaching, and cultural and labour practices. The zombie trope offers an unusual perspective into discussions about the current crises in higher education, and the proposed structure of the book allows for the 3 editors to open up interdisciplinary discussion (with their 3 sections covering corporatisation & zombification, digital media & moribund content distribution, and zombie literacies & pedagogies). "Zombies in the Academy" taps into the current popular fascination with zombies and brings together scholars from a range of fields, including cultural and communications studies, sociology, film studies, and education, to give a critical account of the political, cultural, and pedagogical state of the university through the metaphor of zombiedom. The contributions to this volume argue that the increasing corporatization of the academy - an environment emphasizing publication, narrow research, and a vulnerable tenure system - is creating a crisis in higher education best understood through the language of zombie culture: the undead, contagion, and plague, among others. "Zombies in the Academy" presents essays from a variety of scholars and creative writers who present an engaging and entertaining appeal for serious recognition of the conditions of contemporary humanites teaching, culture, and labour practices.
Understanding Machinima : Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds
Celebrity Studies, 2015
Researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination and exchange of public identity. ... more Researching persona is a study in the production, dissemination and exchange of public identity. One starting point in the process is to look at the production of the presentation of the self online, which allows for a particularly valuable way of exploring celebrity and public personalities. In order to advance on this point, this article examines three emerging and complementary methods of persona studies that work to capture different elements in the production of public identity. In the following we provide an introduction to the research currently being generated using three intersectional methods as a primer to the study of persona. We first present an adaptation of interpretative phenomenological analysis for the investigation of online identity as a means for understanding the strategic and negotiated agency that constructing a public persona entails. Second, we outline the potential for methods of social network analysis and data visualisation to contribute to the investigation of networked structures of public identities, and to further explore the assembly of a professional persona in the creative and niche paratextual industry roles enabled by social media. Finally, to explore reputation and relational cultural power we consider how persona is constituted by connections, adapting prosopography – an historical method for identifying relational status in a community – to the study of current public production of the self and relational reputation as a form of cultural field. All of these techniques are equally useful for the direct study of celebrity persona, and function dynamically together as means to access the wider dimensions of public persona.
First Monday, 2010
The sharing of music files has been the focus of a massive struggle between representatives of ma... more The sharing of music files has been the focus of a massive struggle between representatives of major record companies and artists in the music industry, on one side, and peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing services and their users, on the other. This struggle can be analysed in terms of tactics used by the two sides, which can be classified into five categories: cover-up versus exposure, devaluation versus validation, interpretation versus alternative interpretation, official channels versus mobilisation, and intimidation versus resistance. It is valuable to understand these tactics because similar ones are likely to be used in ongoing struggles between users of p2p services and representatives of the content industries.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2011
Convergent media and communication technologies have changed what it means for games to be mobile... more Convergent media and communication technologies have changed what it means for games to be mobile, but play has a mobility of its own that often goes unacknowledged. This article draws together emerging theory from debates in game studies on the separation of the experience of gameplay from the everyday. It examines the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’ and analyses how play, as a mode of experience, is mobilized across dimensions of hardware and software, extending the functions of games beyond the imagining of designers and manufacturers. The article considers what the mobility of play indicates for the player in the creation and management of identity online in the light of game studies consolidation of the magic circle through Goffman’s Frame Analysis. It sees new opportunities in the play of Zombie Media and the role of digital game artifacts in the presentation of the gamer persona, recasting Benjamin and Baudelaire’s flâneur as the ‘gameur’.
Game Studies, Feb 1, 2011
An iconic staple of the First-Person Shooter genre, Team Fortress 2, is popular for its chaotic a... more An iconic staple of the First-Person Shooter genre, Team Fortress 2, is popular for its chaotic action, distinguished by its painterly aesthetics, and made unique by the introduction of hats as rewards for its players. This study investigates the intersection of virtual millinery items, player achievements, user generated content and the implications for online gamer personas as they are connected to the digital distribution platform, Steam. The article examines the iterations of affect involved in the design and play of a game no ...
Persona Studies, 2017
Before Facebook, Twitter, and most of the digital media platforms that now form routine parts of ... more Before Facebook, Twitter, and most of the digital media platforms that now form routine parts of our online lives, Jay Bolter (2000) anticipated that online activities would reshape how we understand and produce identity: a 'networked self', he noted, 'is displacing Cartesian printed self as a cultural paradigm' (2000, p. 26). The twenty-first century has not only produced a proliferation and mass popularisation of platforms for the production of public digital identities, but also an explosion of scholarship investigating the relationship between such identities and technology. These approaches have mainly focussed on the relations between humans and their networks of other human connections, often neglecting the broader implications of what personas are and might be, and ignoring the rise of the non-human as part of social networks. In this introductory essay, we seek to both trace the work done so far to explore subjectivity and the public presentation of the self via networked technologies, and contribute to these expanding accounts by providing a brief overview of what we consider to be five important dimensions of an online persona. In the following, we identify and explicate the five dimensions of persona as public, mediatised, performative, collective and having intentional value and, while we acknowledge that these dimensions are not exhaustive or complete, they are certainly primary. KEY NODES OF RESEARCH The scope of research in this field is wide and varied, fruitfully informed by multiple disciplinary perspectives. Here we trace only a handful of scholars and concepts, focusing in particular on work that is foundational or influential in our formulations of the dimensions of online persona. Harrison Rainie and Barry Wellman (2012), for example, advance the notion of 'networked individualism', which helps to acknowledge and account for the connections between online activity and the formation of subjectivity. They remind us that communication technologies, media platforms, and digital services are not isolated objects or discrete entities, but are voraciously incorporated into the lives of individuals as part of the extant identity assemblage that is undergoing continuous revision, updates, and patching as we form connections and exchange information with other people and other systems. Zizi Papacharissi's (2010) media and communication perspective presents us with another elaboration of the 'networked self', a term which she uses to indicate the construction of a subjective performance across multiple and simultaneous streams of social awareness that expands autonomy, potentially reduces agency, and which requires constant self-surveillance and monitoring. Philosophers Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2007), have expressed a 'nostalgia' for a time when there was no need to produce quantitative data about the self but, drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Mark Hansen (2015) argues that within any performance of subjectivity-human or nonhuman-there is a generalised subjectivity that inheres within quantitative data; a "dispersal of agency across networks" (2015, p. 3) that is a marker of the elemental character of contemporary media. According to Hansen, Whitehead's speculative philosophy, along with his insistence on the universality of subjectivity as the basis for a re-anchoring of human experience within media networks that have become substantially decoupled from direct human perception, helps us to appreciate the irreducible sensory dimension of the "data-fied" experience: ...subjectivity acquires its power not because it incorporates and processes what is outside, but rather through its direct co-participation or sharing in the
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Articles by Christopher L Moore
public identity. One starting point in the process is to look at the production of the
presentation of the self online, which allows for a particularly valuable way of
exploring celebrity and public personalities. In order to advance on this point, this
article examines three emerging and complementary methods of persona studies that
work to capture different elements in the production of public identity. In the following
we provide an introduction to the research currently being generated using three
intersectional methods as a primer to the study of persona. We first present an
adaptation of interpretative phenomenological analysis for the investigation of online
identity as a means for understanding the strategic and negotiated agency that constructing
a public persona entails. Second, we outline the potential for methods of
social network analysis and data visualisation to contribute to the investigation of
networked structures of public identities, and to further explore the assembly of a
professional persona in the creative and niche paratextual industry roles enabled by
social media. Finally, to explore reputation and relational cultural power we consider
how persona is constituted by connections, adapting prosopography – an historical
method for identifying relational status in a community – to the study of current public
production of the self and relational reputation as a form of cultural field. All of these
techniques are equally useful for the direct study of celebrity persona, and function
dynamically together as means to access the wider dimensions of public persona.
Keywords: massive multiplayer online role-playing games, intellectual property, commons
Papers by Christopher L Moore
public identity. One starting point in the process is to look at the production of the
presentation of the self online, which allows for a particularly valuable way of
exploring celebrity and public personalities. In order to advance on this point, this
article examines three emerging and complementary methods of persona studies that
work to capture different elements in the production of public identity. In the following
we provide an introduction to the research currently being generated using three
intersectional methods as a primer to the study of persona. We first present an
adaptation of interpretative phenomenological analysis for the investigation of online
identity as a means for understanding the strategic and negotiated agency that constructing
a public persona entails. Second, we outline the potential for methods of
social network analysis and data visualisation to contribute to the investigation of
networked structures of public identities, and to further explore the assembly of a
professional persona in the creative and niche paratextual industry roles enabled by
social media. Finally, to explore reputation and relational cultural power we consider
how persona is constituted by connections, adapting prosopography – an historical
method for identifying relational status in a community – to the study of current public
production of the self and relational reputation as a form of cultural field. All of these
techniques are equally useful for the direct study of celebrity persona, and function
dynamically together as means to access the wider dimensions of public persona.
Keywords: massive multiplayer online role-playing games, intellectual property, commons
Enchanting David Bowie explores David Bowie as an anti-temporal figure and argues that we need to understand him across the many media platforms and art spaces he intersects with including theatre, film, television, the web, exhibition, installation, music, lyrics, video, and fashion. This exciting collection is organized according to the key themes of space, time, body, and memory - themes that literally and metaphorically address the key questions and intensities of his output. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/enchanting-david-bowie-9781628923056/#sthash.XyYd0s8z.dpuf