Amateurs online: Creativity in a community

Linguistic Capital and Development Capital in a Network of Cultural Producers: Mutually Valuing Peer Groups in the ‘Interactive Fiction’ Retrogaming Scene

“…In contrast with most other videogame genres, these games employ a wholly or primarily textual interface modelled on the command line interface (CLI) of early computer terminals (see Figure 1, which depicts CLI-style gameplay in Zork I ). The commercial market for such videogames collapsed in the late 1980s (see Aarseth, 1997: 102; Montfort, 2005: 166–168), but they have since continued to be produced on a non-commercial or hobbyist basis by members of the IF community (see Van Dijk, 2014). It is difficult to estimate the current or former size of this community, although it is instructive to note that, at the time of data collection, the website from which quantitative data were collected had nearly 3000 registered accounts and held details on works of IF by something approaching 2300 developers.…”

“…Aarseth, 1997: 109, 127–128; Niesz and Holland, 1984: 122), and discourse within the IF community provides little or no support for the identification of IF with literature, electronic or otherwise. As Van Dijk observes, debates tend to frame works of IF as games, non-game references tend to be to genre fiction and to science fiction and fantasy movies rather than to works of literature, discussion of IF as literature is very limited, and discourse on the aesthetics of IF indicates that ‘the genre of commercial computer games is more relevant to many IF-developers and to the technical and narrative questions they deal with’ than is the genre of literary fiction (2014: 97–98). Moreover, members of the IF community typically refer to individual pieces of IF as ‘games’ and write of ‘playing’ IF (as quotations in this article will show).…”

“…Enthusiasts for the form – the self-styled ‘IF community’ – are sufficiently numerous to make data scraping and quantitative network analysis necessary if a ‘whole population’ approach is desired (see Savage and Burrows, 2007). Moreover, this community’s acts of valuing are relatively straightforward to track because they occur publicly via the internet: as Van Dijk notes, the IF community ‘ha[s] no other material or immaterial mode of existence … than [online] exchanges’ (2014: 98). This means that, in addition to its intrinsic interest as an example of the little-studied phenomenon of retrogaming culture, the IF community makes a particularly straightforward case study for a methodological approach with wider application.…”

“…That approach involves providing a sociohistorical account of a cultural form together with its valuing community, identifying resources that appear to play a role in the valuing of that form by that community, then modelling the community’s valuing behaviours as a network and thereby identifying a core of producers who value each other’s work, and finally comparing all producers to those within the network core in terms of evidence for the possession of these resources. While the only previously published sociological study of the IF community employed qualitative data drawn from Usenet (Van Dijk, 2014), this article focuses on quantitative data procedurally gathered from the Interactive Fiction Database or IFDB (www.ifdb.tads.org), a widely-used IF community institution founded in 2007 by Michael J. Roberts. Email interviewing was employed as a source of qualitative data by which to contextualise the quantitative findings.…”

Contra el ciberutopismo. Discurso utópico "versus" análisis sociológico sobre la transición al paradigma digital de la esfera cultural

“…15 Más recientemente, otros autores hacen referencia a comunidades de creadores on line que generan escenas creativas (Fuster, 2011;van Dijk, 2014). Sin embargo, utilizar la noción de comunidad en un sentido sociológico del término es problemático: autores clásicos de la sociología como Tönnies (2002) señala que las comunidades están ligadas por lazos de interdependencia y afectividad.…”