Spot Check Flashback #2: Gaming the Narrative Process
In which I inadvertently reinforce Godwin’s Law, talk about the dangers of storytelling, and how HP Lovecraft dodged some of them.
Posts Tagged 'geek'
Spot Check 15: Rules Complexity and Intimidation
How does bringing new players into a group of gamers influence their group identity? How does the complexity of a game shape a new player’s experience? Find out in this installment of Spot Check!
Spot Check 14: Gamer Evangelism
As promised, here is the most recent episode of Spot Check, the video series documenting my dissertation research into tabletop gaming. New episodes will be posted every Thursday. If you’d like to start at the beginning, you can go directly to the Youtube channel, or catch the archived episodes as they go up every Saturday. In this episode I talk about insider anthropology and gamers’ enthusiasm for bringing new people into the hobby.
(Crowd)Funding Like a Geek
After I wrote a post about “vexing” and then disappearing for six months, you could be forgiven for thinking that by “vexing” I mean “troll the blog by never posting.” My absence was not prompted by the lulz, however, but by needing to focus all of my attention on fieldwork for my dissertation on tabletop role-playing games. I still have some fieldwork left to do, but have finally been able to come up for air and share some of how my research has been going and how that relates to geek anthropology.
Geek Girl Survey Udpate 2: for science!
Last November, when I started compiling the data from the Geek Girl Survey, I was delighted to find that the wonderful individuals who took part in this project took the time to provide dense material for me to analyse (as well as several Portal references). I took the time to sort through everything carefully and I improved the questionnaire as much as possible for a second round of data collection. I will soon make it available again, so if you haven’t filled it out yet or if you know geek girls who might want to contribute, be on the lookout.
Before I start publishing the results from the survey, however, I’d like to share with you a shortened version of the paper I presented last November at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. This paper, titled (Fake) Geek Girls: Unicorns, Sluts and Nerds? serves as a good introduction to the Geek Girl Survey and will be published in two parts this week.
The Geek Anthropologist 