Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-132). / An audience's satisfaction with an entertainment product is dependent on how well their expectations are fulfilled. This study delves into the implicit contract that is formed between the purveyor of an entertainment property and their audience, as well as the consequences of frustrating audience expectations. Building on this model of the implicit contract, the creation of expectations through marketing, character and world development, and the invocation of genre discourses are examined through the lens of the television shows House M.D. and Veronica Mars. The issues surrounding the dynamic equilibrium between novelty and stability in serial entertainment and entertainment franchises brought up by these initial case studies are examined in further detail through the collectible card game Magic: the Gathering, and the complexity of the interactions between different types of expectations are demonstrated via a study of the superhero comics serials 52 and Civil War. / by Alexander Chance Austin. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-71). / This thesis explores the practices of filmmakers of color in the United States who employ strategies to circumvent industrial, financial and cultural barriers to production and distribution. To overcome these barriers, many filmmakers of color in the United States operate as independents, which can allow them to route around Hollywood or forge a new space within. For most contemporary independent minority filmmakers, such as those from Latin, Asian, Pacific, Native and African American communities, an amalgam of political, industrial, economic and technological shifts have both facilitated and hindered access to crucial funding and distribution opportunities, which in turn impacts their ability to control and shape their imagery and identity. The result of these impediments inspires a mix of endeavors by those who seek mainstream access and success, those who seek independent status, and the hybrid practices of those who increasingly negotiate between the two. Hybrid Cinematics describes practices of those who negotiate such strategies to not only overcome persistent barriers, but also to strengthen their presence and authority within the American motion picture industry. / by Tracy K. Daniels. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2010. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / "June 2010." Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-235). / How does one design a game to make change? How can I design a game that engages players in ethical gameplay? For this project, I used multiple methodologies--research through design, background research, iterative game design, playtesting, and player interviews--to explore strategies that game designers might use to accomplish goals that involve affecting change in players. I designed a pervasive game adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, through which I explored ways to engage players in ethical decision making. I playtested the game, Civilité, with a group of fifteen Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students and affiliates during MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2010. The game ran around the clock for seven days and took place throughout MIT campus. Supported through a variety of media, including a website, audio podcasts, physical props, hidden tupperware boxes, and a variety of paper documents, Civilité transformed the players' everyday campus environment into an imaginary nineteenth century Paris on the eve of Napoléon's Hundred Days. Along with the ethical decisions confronting players' fictional characters, players also had to make ethical decisions regarding what was acceptable gameplay behavior. After the playtest, players participated in a group post mortem and individual thirty minute interviews. This thesis discusses the methodologies that I employed in this project to engage Civilité players in ethical and unethical behavior and to encourage ethical reflection both during and after gameplay. It also addresses the thorny question, "what are game ethics?" by crafting a rough framework for ways that game designers can think about game ethics. Using observations from the playtest, players' daily reports, the group post mortem, and the individual player interviews, this thesis argues that the ethical issues that players identified fall into three ethical domains: the procedural domain, the diegetic domain, and the magic circle's domain. / by Michelle Moon Lee. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-111). / This thesis explores the evolving nature of independent music practices in the context of offline and online social networks. The pivotal role of social networks in the cultural production of music is first examined by treating an independent record label of the post-punk era as an offline social network. This develops a useful framework for then considering the similar and distinctive ways in which contemporary independent practices are enabled and/or shaped by online social networks. Analysis is based on close, comparative readings of the structures and affordances of two case studies: the UK-based Rough Trade record label (1978 - 1991) and MySpace (2003 - present). Numerous examples of artists and their practices are drawn upon to illustrate how discursive meanings of independence are negotiated within each network. Investigated are potentials for realizing not only autonomy from the mainstream music industry, but also a range of other post-punk ideals tied to a broader independent ethos concerned with issues of access and participation, artistic control and freedom, as well as desires to engender more diverse music cultures. The intersection of offline and online networks in the context of today's dynamic, transitional music industry further provides new opportunities for more meaningful artist-to-artist, artist-to-fan, and artist-to-company/label interactions. By emphasizing the centrality of social networks, conceptions of autonomous, "do-it-yourself" music making are problematized in favor of "do-it-together" understandings that foreground cooperation. / by Evan Landon Wendel. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-115). / This thesis examines how Marcel Duchamp's artwork Fountain has been reproduced and evaluated over time. The original piece was made in 1917 and was lost soon after it was created. Fountain has become renowned through its representations, descriptions, and copies and replicas of various scale; consequently, any later artistic critique was directed at the reproductions, rather than the original piece. Considering the fact that the original no longer exists, Fountain's reproductions somewhat reflect the artistic aura of the original, especially when Duchamp was personally involved in their creation. Fountain's reproductions may be viewed as originally (re-)produced artworks on their own. This thesis studies the processes of artistic evaluation applied to Fountain's reproductions. Fountain is a special example for the following reasons: When it first appeared in 1917, it openly posed the question of whether objects mass-produced by manufacture can be given artistic value. Moreover, since Fountain's artistic evaluation has been attributed to the reproductions, Fountain extends the question of attributing artistic value to reproduced objects, to artistic value attributed to reproduced art, in turn also raising questions about the relationship between original and copy. / (cont.) Finally, the artistic evaluation of Fountain has changed radically over time, further evincing the inherently ambiguous and subjective character of artistic evaluations, interpretations and debates. In order to respond to these subjects, this thesis compares the documentary information we have about Fountain, from photographs to descriptions and replicas, in order to analyze how artistic interpretations of the reproductions have gradually qualified Fountain's artistic reputation. A close examination of these reproductions raises dilemmas in regards to Fountain's artifactual status, as these may also be extended to reconsider its characterization as a ready-made. This thesis highlights the dilemmas underlying the interpretations and evaluations about Fountain and questions any presumption of direct analogy or similarity between the original and the reproductions. It explains these presumptions as the outcome of mechanisms of artistic evaluation and support. These mechanisms express the art system, operating each time in order to promote, or to suppress, any artwork. Over time, new artistic standards were being introduced transforming the art system in which Duchamp's artwork would be artistically appraised. / by Ioannis Zavoleas. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2001. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-123). / Introduction: Zoo, garden, arcade--three places emblematic of European society's pleasure in and subjugation of animal and plant nature, of the texture of civilized life in a world created by Industry and Progress. This triad, it seems, would stand in opposition to Lummis' oft-repeated formula of "sun, silence, and adobe," and the vision of stillness in the Southwestern hinterland that it evokes. Indeed, few other regions of the United States have so consistently nurtured the cult of the primitive and the peasant that inheres in Lummis' simple paean to adobe. Indian and Hispano both build from adobe; and it, being earth, absorbs these populations back into the land, wedding artisanal, agrarian, and pastoral lives into an integrated vision of ethnicity and region, a spirit of the desert and of the sky. Here only, the modernist regional aesthete would argue, could the authentic American pastoral be found: "there is that genuineness of unfettered simplicity; the closeness to elemental realities in peasant life, which only in New Mexico, of all states, is indigenous." Hence the modernist Southwest was manifestly not a place of Victorian zoos, picturesque gardens, or Parisian shopping arcades. And yet, I would like to argue, the evanescent afterimages of these places--the ways of being and relating that they nurtured and expressed--appear before and behind the crystalline pictures of snow-blanketed desert and azure sky, the lines of Pueblo dancers, the Hispano santero with his wood and his knife, distorting and fragmenting any purely localist vision of Southwestern regionalism. The scent of piñon smoke mingled in the nose of the newly-arrived traveler with smog from factories in New York, Chicago, or Boston, and smelled all the more pungent because of this mixture. / by Christopher W. York. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-105). / After years of strict bans on the media, local radio in post-Taliban Afghanistan is undergoing an intense period of reconstruction. This thesis uses a multi-sited ethnographic investigation to examine local Afghan radio's various relationships with women in Afghanistan. In examining both the production and consumption contexts of local radio, it pinpoints areas of disjuncture that can and do lead to breakdowns in communications with the Afghan woman audience. Societal constructions of "cultured" tastes in the production room tend to obstruct female-friendly radio in favour of elite, male-oriented textual encodings. Consequently, women's radio transmissions are often at odds with the genre preferences and high levels of illiteracy of women in Afghanistan, failing to communicate with large segments of their intended audience. Radio producers face real and perceived penalties for disrupting cultural rules on what is and is not done on the air, thus the current system propagating ineffective women's radio is highly resistant to change. / by Sarah Kamal. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-80). / This thesis explores "meaningfulness" in videogames. Academics, journalists, and others who write about games often discuss the concept of meaning yet seldom define it clearly. I am focusing on a variation of this topic: what it means for a gaming experience to be meaningful--literally: full of meaning. Meaningfulness, as I define it, refers to the quality a videogame has when one considers it socially, culturally, or personally important. I attempt to answer the question: How do games become meaningful for players. I begin by stripping it down to the core ideas that interest me the most: narrative and emotion. Representing the debate over these terms helps illuminate the larger debate over meaningfulness. To accomplish this I examine different communities and their rhetoric. There are several major interpretive communities of games: academics, practitioners, journalists and consumers. The different ways these communities define narrative and emotion can be understood by examining their rhetoric. This reveals patterns that show the diversity of how meaningfulness is defined. The different ways players construct meaningfulness through rhetoric can be mapped. Doing so illustrates patterns and trends in logic that may not be apparent on the surface, and reveals certain clusters of people who are united by shared rhetoric. This methodology provides a framework to understand the forces shaping opinions over what meaningfulness is and is not in videogames. Identifying this framework and exploring its usefulness is the major project of this thesis. / by Matthew Jason Weise. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2010. / "October 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-94). / A design feature of contemporary sport video games allows elite athletes to play as themselves in life-like representations of actual sporting events. The relation between playing sport video games and actual physical performance has not yet been established. Drawing on data from interviews and observations of elite athletes playing sport video games, this thesis explores why elite athletes are playing these video games as their virtual selves, and establishes a framework for understanding how this play may enhance learning opportunities. Building on theories based in the disciplines of psychoanalysis, education, and neuroscience, this thesis argues that virtual play by athletes playing as themselves in sport video games has the potential to support and encourage physical performance. / by Lauren Silberman. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. / The growth and spread of the Internet have generated new possibilities for public participation with news content, forcing news scholars and makers alike to confront a number of questions about what the nature, role and function of news, journalists, and audiences are in a networked society. If news gathering, reporting, and circulation had existed for generations as a largely centralized process, left to the minds and hands of reporters organized through news rooms across the nation, the environment of the Internet and interactive properties of new media counter such a model, affording users with as much capacity to produce their own news content as they have had to merely consume it. This thesis, then, seeks to contribute to scholarship on online journalism through an ethnographic study of the five-year-old, technology-centered news site Slashdot.org as an emerging model of online news production and distribution I call a collaborative new network. Embodying a pronounced case of the decentralization of editorial control in online news environments, Slashdot's collaborative news network operates through an inscription of users as the primary producers of news content; an expansion of an understanding of the site of news to include not just journalistic reports and articles, but the discussion by users around them; debate around issues of editorial authority; a valuation of subjectivity and transparency as properties of news; and the generation of user-driven forms of collective action whose effects extend beyond the environment of Slashdot's network. This study will focus, then, on an examination of the social practices and processes surrounding the production, consumption and distribution of news on Slashdot, and the meanings that are generated through such activities. Through such an analysis, I hope to explore how practices enacted on Slashdot (re)construct users' relationship to news, editors, and one another - and similarly investigate how it (re)constructs editors relationship to news, readers, and one another. / by Anita J. Chan. / S.M.