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sophiaserpentiaI learned a lot, about myself and the nature of fandom, from the great WoW RealIDFail controversy of last week.
Being a fan of just about anything will generally get you a lot of grief, and so people learn in public not to mention that they are a fan. Unless you're talking about sports fans -- which makes me think that scorning fans is yet another secret form of misogyny, peppered with our society's general scorn for intelligence. I think this is part of why, whenever the producers or writers of an entertainment franchise do something that ignites fan controversy, discussion within the fan base isn't so much between opponents & supporters, as it is between opponents and people making fun of opponents.
But I got to thinking about the notion of being "emotionally invested" in something. A fan is someone who has made a significant emotional investment, not to mention a significant financial investment as well, in an entertainment franchise. That's not to mention the contribution they make to the community -- fan art, fan fic, etc., the glue which binds fans together and keeps them spending money -- and their enthusiastic free publicity for the franchise: word-of-mouth and viral marketing which advertisers dream of (because it means customers doing their job for them).
However, fans are not usually seen by the producers and creators as being co-investors at all. From the other perspective, the "investors" are the creative talent and the ones who sign the checkbooks at production time. This leaves fans in an incredibly vulnerable position: they are investors who have no real say in the decisions that are made.
This may be a large part of why so many people's relationship with a fandom, a very personal and intense experience, often quite literally a formative part of their lives, more often than not ends with sadness or disappointment. Fans make what is for them a huge investment in something in which they have no real say; the only vote they get is to stop consuming.
As a writer I can see how the flip-side might become somewhat harrowing; if you listen to fans *too* much, if you deliver only what they want, you might feel too constrained and feel as though you've had to sell your artistic integrity.
Before RealIDFail I would likely have sided with the writer 100%. But as I've said before, the meaning of a creative work is essentially the response intended to be provoked in the reader/listener/viewer. The writer or musician or developer does not develop subsequent works in a vacuum, especially at the point when there is a large, vibrant, active fan community. (So was Stephen King saying in Misery that he felt hobbled by his fan base?)
I'm not sure what I'm saying here in terms of how much an artist or developer owes to the fan community, I'm just... thinking about this and seeing if there's a dialog to be had about it. How much of a say do fans have? How much say should they have? Will artistic quality or meaningfulness suffer or improve if fans are allowed greater access and influence? There's a perception that an artist who caters too openly to fans will create inferior content -- is there any truth to this?
Being a fan of just about anything will generally get you a lot of grief, and so people learn in public not to mention that they are a fan. Unless you're talking about sports fans -- which makes me think that scorning fans is yet another secret form of misogyny, peppered with our society's general scorn for intelligence. I think this is part of why, whenever the producers or writers of an entertainment franchise do something that ignites fan controversy, discussion within the fan base isn't so much between opponents & supporters, as it is between opponents and people making fun of opponents.
But I got to thinking about the notion of being "emotionally invested" in something. A fan is someone who has made a significant emotional investment, not to mention a significant financial investment as well, in an entertainment franchise. That's not to mention the contribution they make to the community -- fan art, fan fic, etc., the glue which binds fans together and keeps them spending money -- and their enthusiastic free publicity for the franchise: word-of-mouth and viral marketing which advertisers dream of (because it means customers doing their job for them).
However, fans are not usually seen by the producers and creators as being co-investors at all. From the other perspective, the "investors" are the creative talent and the ones who sign the checkbooks at production time. This leaves fans in an incredibly vulnerable position: they are investors who have no real say in the decisions that are made.
This may be a large part of why so many people's relationship with a fandom, a very personal and intense experience, often quite literally a formative part of their lives, more often than not ends with sadness or disappointment. Fans make what is for them a huge investment in something in which they have no real say; the only vote they get is to stop consuming.
As a writer I can see how the flip-side might become somewhat harrowing; if you listen to fans *too* much, if you deliver only what they want, you might feel too constrained and feel as though you've had to sell your artistic integrity.
Before RealIDFail I would likely have sided with the writer 100%. But as I've said before, the meaning of a creative work is essentially the response intended to be provoked in the reader/listener/viewer. The writer or musician or developer does not develop subsequent works in a vacuum, especially at the point when there is a large, vibrant, active fan community. (So was Stephen King saying in Misery that he felt hobbled by his fan base?)
I'm not sure what I'm saying here in terms of how much an artist or developer owes to the fan community, I'm just... thinking about this and seeing if there's a dialog to be had about it. How much of a say do fans have? How much say should they have? Will artistic quality or meaningfulness suffer or improve if fans are allowed greater access and influence? There's a perception that an artist who caters too openly to fans will create inferior content -- is there any truth to this?
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Date: 2010-07-12 08:03 pm (UTC)Blizzard is not one lone writer churning out creative works and hobbled by his/her crazed fans. What you have with the advent of MMOs is a genre or art form (if you will) that COULD NOT EXIST without a multitude of players. It is, in effect, shaped by the people who play it. They become part of the art form. Stephen King could write books and store them in his closet and they could be found long after his death. In fact, in some of the stories he has written the writer character (who is clearly based on him) does just that - often enough to make me wonder how often he's stored away a novel for a rainy day to stave off his publishers when his creative well runs temporarily dry. Emily Dickinson wrote poems considered beautiful and classic but which were only found after her death. Sometimes I worry too much interaction and need for feedback is killing me as a writer, in fact.
MMO's are not novels. MMO's are not plays. They aren't paintings. They are more than just twitch games. They are more than just tabletop RPGs. They are something new and different and terribly, terribly compelling. The little anthropologist person who's lived in my head my entire life sits back and watches, cooly, as some of these absurd situations I get myself in play out, and my emotional reactions, and other people's emotional reactions, and wonders just why anyone can get so worked up over it, but everyone does. Lioke I said to you in the car the other night, there's something here the psychologists and the art field and everyone who dismisses these as "silly games for geeks" is missing. Something very huge is going on here. I'm not always sure its entirely healthy. I'll be damned if I can fully explain it. There's no way how I can explain trying out this game in Wrath beta and walking into Crystalsong forest for the first time and beginning to cry because I'm touched by the beauty of it. It is embarassing even to say that. But its very real. It frightens me a little. Maybe more than a little.
I drifted a bit there but - beyond just the interactive universe itself - its the interactions between players themselves that make the Blizzard universe alive and meaningful. Example - like the whole Internet Dragons post said - they made these dragons you can kill, right? Some are so hard they take weeks or months of planning and a concerted, group effort of up to 40 people working together as a team to defeat. Without those people, dedicated to working together to do things like this in game, it's just pretty pictures on a computer screen. Those people are then an integral part of this "product". this goes beyond just mere consumers. With a book, you buy the book, you read it, a sort of passive observation. Same with a movie. With a console game you play single player, you interact with it at home in a limited sort of way. But this is a new and different animal.
It will be interesting to see where it goes.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-12 08:35 pm (UTC)A fandom is a way of making a franchise into something more interactive, and I think honestly that greater interactivity is the way of the future. Once someone comes out with a total sandbox MMO -- by which I mean a way for people to tell their own stories or collaborate on stories using the interactive tools of an MMO, I'm going to have geekgasms from here to infinity.