PhD dissertation defense Nicolle Lamerichs

We have another upcoming PhD dissertation defense to mention here: our colleague Nicolle Lamerichs will defend her thesis Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures at Maastricht University. Here’s the teaser text from the back cover of the dissertation:

Loners, geeks, fanatics – fans have often been misunderstood and ridiculed in popular media. Productive Fandom proves this imagery to be false and offers a media ethnography of fan cultures as they are lived: social, creative and felt spaces of productive reception. Fans appropriate populare culture to suit their alternative tastes.

Written from an insider’s perspective, Productive Fandom explores these rich subcultures that provide new insights on the shared spaces of consumers, producers and media texts. Productive Fandom shows that fans are above all creative. They write their own stories, “cosplay” in their own dresses and invent their own games. Fandom is a rich and vibrant culture of rewriting – a formation of media spaces and audiences that come together online and offline.
Fandom gets more complex as media franchises are distributed across different platforms and audiences translate a television text from one medium to the other. Intermediality is a core concept in this study that shows the diversity of contemporary fandom by studying fans of Sherlock, Glee, Firefly and other popular franchises. The book addresses both scholars and fans and tackles broader questions about production hierarchies, gender, sexuality, play and affect.

The defense ceremony will take place on March 26, at 12.00, at the Maastricht University Aula, Minderbroedersberg 4-6, Maastricht.

PhD dissertation defense Teresa De la Hera Conde-Pumpido

We are proud to announce the upcoming PhD dissertation defense of our colleague Teresa De la Hera Conde-Pumpido. The title of her thesis is Persuasive Structures in Advergames: Conveying Advertising Messages Through Digital Games, and here’s a short summary:

The evolution of the game industry and changes in the advertising landscape in recent years have led to a keen interest of marketers in using digital games for advertising purposes. Digital games specifically designed for a brand with the aim of conveying an advertising message, are known as advergames.

The increasing interest in the use of digital games as a marketing strategy is undoubtedly related to the development of new technologies and the proliferation of broadband and mobile devices and the closely popularization of digital games. However, despite the increasing interest in this marketing strategy, marketers and marketing companies still need more knowledge about the potential of digital games as a medium to convey advertising messages. This thesis aims at broadening the understanding of how advertising messages can be embedded within digital games.
In this thesis an interdisciplinary framework is used in order to outline a theoretical model aiming to structure the existing knowledge to help explain how persuasive communication works within digital games.

You are welcome to join us at the defense ceremony, which will take place on Monday March 17, between 12:45 and 13:45, in the Academiegebouw (Senaatszaal) in Utrecht. More information can be found here.

PhD Defense Teun Dubbelman: Narratives of Being There: Computer Games, Presence and Fictional Worlds

On July 9 2014, our colleague Teun Dubbelman will defend his PhD dissertation, entitled Narratives of Being There: Computer Games, Presence and Fictional Worlds. Feel free to attend the ceremony!

When: 9/7/2013 10.30
Where: Academiegebouw – Domplein 29, Utrecht

The full dissertation can be found HERE, but here’s the abstract:

Narrative game designer, or simply narrative designer, is a role in contemporary computer game development. The narrative designer is responsible for designing the player’s experience of a game’s fictional world. This study delves into the practice of narrative design from the perspective of embodied presence. In comparison with books, movies and other media, the medium of computer games excels in offering the media user the feeling of being a physically present participant in the fictional world. When exploiting the merits of embodied presence, narrative designers are challenged to express fictional worlds without disrupting this feeling of “being-there”. Close-ups, flashbacks, ellipses and other narrative devices–common to other audio-visual media–cannot be employed to the same extent. This study reconceptualises and apposes the notions of presence and narrative by critically expanding on Presence Theory, phenomenological media theory and narratology. Drawing from insights and practices in game, film, performance, architecture and literature studies, the study subsequently proposes alternative narrative devices, more compatible with the interactive and spatial nature of computer games, enabling designers to express fictional worlds while maintaining the player’s feeling of embodied presence.