Transcript:
Traditionally, you start making your point with a simple, pithy phrase that is uselessly wrong, so here we go: Media research is research of media. That’s nice and straightforwards, right? Media in this context refers to the production of humans in almost all forms. It’s about television shows and newspaper comics and the words we use when talking to one another and it’s twitter and it’s videogames and it’s historical forms of literature that aren’t really practiced any more and it’s fan works and – jeeze, this is unwieldy. Ahem.
So you expand it a little: Media research is research of how people react to, engage with, and exist around media, in many forms or specific forms. Because ultimately, the media is something that the research doesn’t directly care about. Oh, the media is important to media research, but you can’t make much by just looking at the media in media research for hours on end. You need, ultimately, to have some form of audience, some human context for what the media does. And that context needs to be addressed and part of the research. Propaganda films from World War 2 convey a different message to us now than they did to the people of the time, for example!
Then you go back and redefine an early term: Media research, in an academic context, is the research, with degrees of tolerance, proper ethical frameworks and an intentional eye towards provable outcomes, of how people react to, engage with, and exist around media in many forms or specific forms.
Then you look at what you’ve written, sigh, and scribble it out, and start again, knowing you can’t do it all in one tight, confined sentence: What is Media Research?
What would I like to research?
I’m a games dork. I’m a videogame dork, I’m a card game dork, and better yet I’m the kind of dork who writes about these things as if people want to talk about games rather than play them. I’m the kind of dork who reads people writing about games rather than playing them. What I can say about any piece of research I want to do, what I want to look at in a greater media research context, is I want to look at, and talk about, games.
In the recent history of videogames there’s been the eruption of a pustule of misogyny and hatred known as Gamergate. At the same time, there’s a blossoming swell of game markets to become massively more inclusive. There’s the push for radical inclusivity in development platforms, for the internationalisation of game creation, and the riding golden age of non-video games, a period when board games and card games are on what Mark Rosewater (Magic Head Developer) calls ‘A steady incline.’
The problem I have right now isn’t What do I want to research, but where to focus my efforts. Right now, the world is full of fascinating research opportunities, and I’m going to need to take some time to sort out just what I want to look at most closely.
Unicorn Dispatches 