Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Barwick, Joanna; Watkins, Dawn; Kirk, Elee; Law, Effie

2018 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

doi: 10.1177/1354856516677682

There is a wide range of interest in gamification – with game design elements being used in an increasing number of non-game contexts. Yet, despite these developments, there has been little interest from the academic community in the potential opportunities that gamification presents in the research context. Law in Children’s Lives is an innovative project that has explored the use of a specially designed tablet-based game, Adventures with Lex, as a data collection tool. The game, developed using participatory design techniques, has been used as a means to investigate children’s perceptions of the law in their everyday lives. This article presents a case study of the processes and challenges involved in the development of the game which leads to a discussion of the implications of this study for the wider use of game-based research.

von Rimscha, M Bjørn; Verhoeven, Marcel; Krebs, Isabelle; Sommer, Christoph; Siegert, Gabriele

2018 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

doi: 10.1177/1354856516678410

While it has been acknowledged that convergence is a multidimensional phenomenon, the convergence of media production processes has received little attention from researchers so far. In this article, we address this research gap with a qualitative study of production processes in different types of media. Our starting point is that independent of the media type, common product characteristics can be identified, that promote success in the audience market. We ask whether the same is true for process characteristics; whether there are converged processes that promote audience success independent of the media type. The study is based on n = 39 interviews in the German-speaking markets. Our findings provide a differentiated result: We do find similarities in the processes along the lines of product characteristics; however, the project phase is an important influencer. While processes in the development phase are more converged, production and distribution still demand distinct processes for different media types. In general, we can confirm studies that find a reluctance of media practitioners towards convergence, which often remains an underfunded and cost-oriented brain child of the top management.

White, Allison E; Weinstein, Emily; Selman, Robert L

2018 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

doi: 10.1177/1354856516678349

The authors analyzed 300 stories about adolescents’ friendship challenges in order to explore the roles of digital technologies in contemporary friendship conflicts. An initial round of analysis facilitated the identification and subsequent classification of stories by five commonly described challenges: betrayal, isolation, meanness and harassment, concern about a Friend, and Maintenance Challenges. Drawing on previously identified features of exchanges in and through digital contexts, including scalability, persistence, replicability, and anonymity, the role of technology was then explored in the context of the five friendship challenges. Scalability, leveraging the affordance of efficiently reaching a broad audience, was the most common way technology amplified friendship challenges. However, technology also often functioned solely as the medium for communication. Additionally, adolescents described difficulties related to sexting as a contemporary friendship challenge. Implications for supporting youth in their friendships are discussed.

Malloy, Judy

2018 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

doi: 10.1177/1354856516675255

Intertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family histories in a work of polyphonic electronic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata, streams and fountains, and Irish and Irish American song, From Ireland with Letters (2010 - 2016) is an epic electronic manuscript told in the public space of the Internet. Situating the work in the contexts of Irish public literature and of public electronic literature, this paper explores both the work itself and issues of public electronic literature and in the process both divulges little known Irish American histories and suggests the potential for the public literature telling of narrative and poetry on the Internet.

Le Cor, Gwen

2018 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

doi: 10.1177/1354856516675254

This article builds on an analysis of Sea and Spar Between by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland and Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer to examine print and digital forms of writing through resonance, replication, and repetition. It explores the plastic and textual space of the page and screen and focuses more specifically on the composition of fragments and the way they can be apprehended by readers. Conversely, digital borrowing is not a mechanical process of self-identical recurrence, and like its print counterpart, it is a gesture of differenciation and a play of singularities (Deleuze). In investigating the entanglement of a work with a source text, this article also explores how creative gestures initiate a “floating” space as theorized by Jean-François Lyotard, that is, a space at once rigid and flexible where the reader is both bound and floating.

Smith, Sophy

2018 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

doi: 10.1177/1354856516675253

This article explores the opportunities and implications for new digital writing in transmedia performance environments. This article centres on the experimental Pervasive Theatre project (Assault Events 2014, commissioned by futuredream funded through Arts Council England), which explored the potential of online social tools to create a multimedia, collaborative and participatory work situated across multiple platforms. This project brought together researchers, artists, writers, technologists and practitioners from the interdisciplinary fields of digital writing, transmedia and performance to explore ways to develop narratives that weave together physical and online worlds, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy, audience and performers in a way that would be exciting, immersive and participative. The project looked at different performative spaces including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vines, exploring how these platforms could support the delivery of original narrative performance. This transmedia approach informed and shaped the digital writing practice, instigating new modes of working. Four aspects were of particular interest and will be explored in this article – how new writing can emerge from within online spaces rather than being translated onto them; how characteristics of different online social platforms inform style and content; how social media platforms can be used to develop narrative and character through creative collaboration with performers; and finally, how online social spaces enable the digital writer to develop a narrative framework through which audiences frame their own meaning.