Capital, dialogue, and community engagement: "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" understood as an alternate reality game

Abstract

The experience of engaging with the television show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is structurally and affectively analogous to the experience of an alternate reality game. The community presents multiple tiers of engagement in which individual contributions can be recognized; the creators of the show include material with the specific intent that it be taken up by the community but without any control of the way in which it is used, and material created by the community is folded into the text by the creators in a dialogue. The context of the cocreative dialogue that surrounds the show and its community is a good example of both what Paul Booth identifies as a digi-gratis economy and the forensic fandom used by Jason Mittell to understand community engagement and response to Lost.

Thousands of Positive Reviews

“…We focused our research on three popular fandoms: Harry Potter, Doctor Who, and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Previous research related to these fandoms has focused on fan identities [39], gender and sexuality [26,58], civic engagement and fan activism [27,37], copyright issues [14,51], and fan community engagement [60], rather than on mentoring processes related to fanfiction writing in these fandoms.…”

Reconsidering religion and fandom: Christian fan works inMy Little Ponyfandom

“…Since its launch in late 2010, the cartoon series MLP:FiM has attracted an oft-commented upon adult fandom (known as 'Bronies') which has expanded the world of the show by generating a significant amount of fan-produced media (Johnson 2013;Robertson 2013;Veale 2013). Within the myriad fan works which have emerged in Brony culture, Christian fans have made use of MLP:FiM as a resource through which to explore religious themes, engage in evangelism and generate alternative methods of biblical exegesis.…”

‘Friendship isn’t an emotion fucknuts’: Manipulating affective materiality to shape the experience of Homestuck’s story

“…Andrew Hussie has solicited art and music 19 from the fan community to fold into the text (Funk, 2012), providing a way for fans to gain recognition and esteem for their contributions. In a similar way to how the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Faust, 2010) has incorporated and reflected fan engagement and theory (Veale, 2013), Andrew Hussie uses discussions in the fan community as fuel for easter-eggs to include as part of the story (Funk, 2012). This means that primary and secondary tiers are not just competing in their speculations as to what happens next, they know they are in a dialogue with the creator of the text, who might find their suggestions sufficiently entertaining to make them part of the ‘official’ text.…”

“…Likewise, the experience of watching television where each episode largely exists in isolation and does not require other episodes in order to be coherent, such as in sitcoms like Married with Children (Moye and Leavitt, 1987) or shows like ER (Crichton, 1994), is fundamentally different to something like Lost (Abrams, 2004) or Veronica Mars (Thomas, 2004). The reason for the difference in the modes of engagement is that the latter cases are part of what Jason Mittell refers to as ‘forensic fandom’, where understanding the story requires the audience take on a ‘detective mentality’ as they engage with the text (Mittell, 2006: 35, 2009a: 128–129, 2009b: 2.3; Veale, 2013). Currently, approaches to critical analysis do not account for how textual structure can shape the processes required to negotiate a given text, or how those processes themselves have an affective dimension that influences the experience of the story.…”