There has been limited adoption of Immersive Journalism (IJ) by the audience; simultaneously, the audience’s perspective is rarely considered in the production and research of IJ. At this point, however, it is crucial to incorporate an audience perspective to identify potentially unintended effects of IJ and improve on the innovation of IJ. This study investigates the audience’s experience and evaluation of IJ by qualitatively analyzing their thoughts after viewing two IJ cases. Our results indicate that the audience may pick up on intended effects, such as a sense of presence and an intense emotional experience, but some also express unease towards these effects. Furthermore, the audience struggles to comprehend this study’s two immersive journalistic cases as part of the journalistic genre. These findings provide insight into the gap between the initial hype and the current reality of IJ and provide the basis for propositions for future IJ productions.
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In media audience research we tend to assume that media are engaged with when they are used, however ‘light’ such engagement might be. Once ‘passive media use’ was banned as a reference to media use, being a media audience member became synonymous with being a meaning producer. In audience research however I find that media are not always the object of meaning making in daily life and that media texts can be hardly meaningful. Thinking about media and engagement, there is a threefold challenge in relation to audience research. The coming into being of platform media and hence of new forms of media production on a micro level that come out of and are woven into practices of media use, suggests that we need to redraft the repertoire of terms used in audience research (and maybe start calling it something else). Material and immaterial media production, the unpaid labour on the part of otherwise audience members should for instance be taken into account. Then, secondly, there is the continuing challenge to further develop heuristically strong ways of linking media use and meaning making, and most of all to do justice, thirdly, to those moments and ways in which audiences truly engage with media texts without identifying them with those texts.
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Audience studies is not the vibrant field it was in its 1980s and early 1990s heyday. Cultural studies today has a more balanced interest in production, audiences and texts. A renewed focus in audience studies on everyday meaning production, identity and relations of power could benefit from recent developments. Theorization of power especially has benefited from recent work on governmentality. In accord with recent work on ‘affect’, there is an opportunity for renewed vitality and urgency. Was audience studies damaged beyond repair by the charge that it is a populist field that celebrates rather than interrogates everyday media culture? Could a concept such as cultural literacy provide a bridge to help re-establish the critical credibility of audience studies or would it burden this field with its implied notions of standards, distinction and cultural exclusion? The article discusses recent work with youth audiences to inquire into the possibilities of ‘critical literacy’. It proposes taking up questions and insights raised by affect theory, to merge appreciation, criticism and understanding of the forces that drive (the possibility of) change, and to embed critical literacy in cultural studies’ ongoing interest in the construction of (cultural) citizenship.
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In this chapter, we propose an ethical framework for serious game design, which we term the Ecosystem for Designing Games Ethically (EDGE).EDGE expands on Zagal’s categorization of ethical areas in game design by incorporating the different contexts of design and their use. In addition, we leverage these contexts to suggest four guidelines that support Ethical Stewardship in serious game design. We conclude by discussing a number of specific areas inwhich ethics plays a role in serious game design. These include games in (a) amilitary context, (b) the consideration of privacy issues, and (c) the evaluation ofgame design choices.
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Gaming Horizons is a EU-funded project that explored the role of video games in culture, the economy and education. We engaged with more than 280 stakeholders through interviews, workshops and webinars.
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Following the Sector Protocol for Quality Assurance for Practice-Based.Contributors Academy for AI, Games and Media:Mata Haggis Burridge (prof. EG), Qiqi Zhou, Hillevi Boerboom, Maria Pafi (postdoc, WuR), Alexander van Buggenum, Ella Betts, Wilma Franchimon (dir. AGM), Nick van Apeldoorn (Coord.Digireal), Harald Warmelink (Coord. Cradle & MSP Challenge), Magali Patrocínio Gonçalves, Ard Bonewald (MT Games), Marin Hekman, Marie Lhuissier, Carlos Santos (CTO Cradle), Jeremiah van Oosten (MT, games), Kevin Hutchinson, Frank Peters (MT ADS&AI), Bram Heijligers, Joey Relouw, Marnix van Gisbergen (Prof. DMC), Shima Rezaei Rashnoodi (Coord. DMC), Phil de Groot, Igor Mayer (prof. SG), Niels Voskens, Fabio Ferreira da Costa Campos, Tuki Clavero, Jens Hagen, Wilco Boode, Natalia Harazhanka-Pietjouw (PPC), Jacopo Fabrini & Silke Hassreiter.
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Gaming Horizons is a EU-funded project that explored the role of video games in culture, the economy and education. We engaged with more than 280 stakeholders through interviews, workshops and webinars.
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The entertainment games industry is still in its early years regarding storytelling, and the field of 'narrative design' is a growing area of attention for students, professionals, and researchers. Like many forms of 20th century media, games use many forms of communication beyond the written word to tell their stories, but they also explicitly centre on the audience's power to interact with the world. This talk gives a brief overview of a narrative designer's toolbox which has previously been shared by Prof. Haggis-Burridge at entertainment industry conferences.
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The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative autoethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.
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What obstacles for game designers arise from the tension between gathering data from citizens and addressing a non-digital but spatially defined audience? This question arose during the Games for Cities game jam held on the 22nd and 23rd of march at the Designhuis in Eindhoven. A collaboration between Games for Cities, Het Nieuwe Instituut through the DATAstudio, the Municipality of Eindhoven, and the Design Academy of Eindhoven offered three groups of design specialists, inhabitants, researchers, and others that would take on a design challenge offered by the municipality.
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