Flagon With The Dragon

GWL: Gaming as Transmedia Studies

// June 21st, 2010 // Fluff

Henry Jenkins posted another in an ongoing series of media studies on the topic of transmedia studies. I think gaming in a complex online world like Eve Online is one of the best examples of the use of transmedia studies in a community. Gamers in Eve regularly leverage information from forums, video tutorials, wikis, podcasts, in game voice chat and a number of media sources to learn and coordinate their gaming activities. I think it’s for this reason that deep community driven games like Eve Online can contribute a set of skills to the gamer that can possible enhance their experience in education. Gamers of this kind naturally gravitate toward multiple media outlets for information and routinely engages in actions that either enforce the quality of learning from that information or proves it’s lack of quality and sends them into another cycle of investigation and study.

I think Henry’s article is a good read and food for thought for everyone. Big thanks to Sarah Toton for passing it on.

Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited
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In a transmedia presentation, students need to actively seek out content through a hunting and gathering process which leads them across multiple media platforms. Students have to decide whether what they find belongs to the same story and world as other elements. They have to weigh the reliability of information that emerges in different contexts. No two people will find the same content and so they end up needing to compare notes and pool knowledge with others. That’s why our skill is transmedia navigation – the capacity to seek out, evaluate, and integrate information conveyed across multiple media.
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