With the rise of Internet, Web and new media technologies come increased opportunities for audience to recreate media content and influence its flow across different media platforms. The fan as a demanding yet enthusiastic consumer has become a centrepiece of media industries' marketing strategies. On the one hand, this qualitative change often described as participatory culture means a giant leap forward for fans, who can now serve new roles within the media industry. On the other, it represents a potential exploitation of media users, as unpaid volunteers do the labour professionals are paid for. This study investigates this tension in a case of videogame fans. On their official websites, videogame developers encourage fans to contribute with their fan art harnessing fan creativity for their advertising purposes. Convergence culture raises conflicts and compromises between creators of fan art (fan artists), and the owners of the copyrighted works they appropriate (game companies). This study addresses three main issues: (1) the way and circumstances under which game companies are displaying fan art on their official websites, (2) how fans understand the tensions between empowerment and exploitation, how do they address the issue of free labour, (3) how fans view issues concerning intellectual property...

Occlusion is a procedurally randomized interactive art experience which uses the motifs of repetition, isolation, incongruity and mutability to develop an experience of a Folie àDeux: a madness shared by two. It draws from traditional video game forms, development methods, and tools to situate itself in context with games as well as other forms of interactive digital media. In this way, Occlusion approaches the making of game-like media from the art criticism perspective of Materiality, and the written work accompanying the prototype discusses critical aesthetic concerns for Occlusion both as an art experience borrowing from games and as a text that can be academically understood in relation to other practices of media making. In addition to the produced software artifact and written analysis, this thesis includes primary research in the form of four interviews with artists, authors, game makers and game critics concerning Materiality and dissociative themes in game-like media. The written work first introduces Occlusion in context with other approaches to procedural remixing, Glitch Art, net.art, and analogue and digital collage and décollage, with special attention to recontextualization and apophenia. The experience, visual, and audio design approach of Occlusion is reviewed through a discussion of explicit design choices which define generative space. Development process, release process, post-release distribution, testing, and maintenance are reviewed, and the paper concludes with a description of future work and a post- mortem discussion. Included as appendices are a full specification document, script, and transcripts of all interviews.