Video Game Fans as Textual Poachers
This was game scholarship paper that I wrote for one of my classes in Fall 2004. It’s based off of the book Textual Poachers written by Dr. Henry Jenkins of MIT. The book is about how television fans appropriate material from the shows they watch and apply it to life outside of the show. It discusses the theory, motivations, and modes of production for these fans. Through the lens of video game academics, topics from the book can be applied to video game fandom. For this case study I chose the website Starmen.net, an EarthBound community website. Instead of just laying out the whole paper in one big document, I felt it would be more useful to break it up into its component parts that are more easily browsable. Don’t be surprised when you’re taken to one of the older versions of the Virtual Fools website.
Home • Introduction • Studying as a Fan • Textual Poaching • EarthBound • Forming a Community • What Poachers Make • The Perfect Poach / Conclusion
