Heading to New York

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve posted — I keep meaning to redo this site so it’s less a blog and more a repository of my current research info, but I’ve been busy. I’ll try to get to that soon, but, hey, that might mean another month or so. Oh well, such is life.

Anyway, I’m flying out tomorrow for New Jersey and New York City, where I’ll be presenting a paper at the American Educational Research Assocation annual conference. My paper is entitled “Literacy Implications of Online Fan Debates” — a rather boring title for a rather fun paper. In it, I analyze the phenomenon of “timeline debates” around the The Legend of Zelda games.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, there has been a fair amount of discussion over the years as to the “correct” ordering of the stories in the Zelda series. That is, does A Link to the Past occur in the same timeline as The Wind Waker or in a different one? Does the original The Legend of Zelda occur after or before Ocarina of Time? These have been pretty esoteric fan debates, but are illustrative of how complex and “design-like” many fan debates are around games. I’m increasingly interested in how informal design practices evolve out of fan communities (around games, TV shows, etc.), and it’s looking more and more like this will be the core of my dissertation.

Anyway, here is a link to the PDF of the full paper, and here is a link to a PDF of the handout I plan on having for attendees of my talk to take with them. If you’re interested, please download and let me know what you think!

If you read this blog and will be in New York for AERA, please stop by and say hi!

P.S., I plan on going here: