Week 6 Class and Reading Reflection

Week six’s reading, Gamers as Co-Creators: Enlisting the Virtual Audience – A Report from the Net Face by John Banks, was a more detailed explanation of John Banks’ Trainz experience as discussed in the lecture. It detailed how the fan forum for Trainz began as a promotional and marketing tool but then became a place where train and rail enthusiasts could give feedback as well as be enlisted in the process of creating an active online Trainz network. It’s really interesting how Auran and train/rail fans have struck up this relationship via an online community that is highly productive; it’s quite unique. It is a perfect example of how “entities such as ‘audience’, ‘fan’, ‘producer’, ‘corporation’ and ‘consumer’ are relational – they emerge from continually transforming networks of relations”.

The lab session for week six was a chat room session. I was in a chat with about five others about Internet politics, however, they kept going off talking about something else. I thought that maybe I hadn’t grasped the topic but I’m beginning to think that maybe they just didn’t do the readings and chose to talk about something completely different, haha, sorry guys. There were some things I didn’t agree with and made me think what the? but I forget what they were now. Oops.