Cinema Blend offers “5 Reasons Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Failed to Find an Audience,” but its reasoning is somewhat suspect at times, and even the title seems like a misnomer to me. “Scott Pilgrim” is currently the top Trending Topic on Twitter. My friends have been talking about it for weeks; a bunch of us saw a free advance screening, and a bunch more saw it on opening weekend. The blogs I follow regularly have been generally gushing praise. The issue doesn’t really seem to be that it “failed to find an audience,” but that the audience it found wasn’t really big enough to promise the kind of box office take that you’d expect with a $60 million budget. The whole phenomenon feels strangely reminiscent of Snakes on a Plane: Everyone was expecting the hype to equal success, when in fact it might have been only enough to make sure the movie makes a modest profit in the long run.

Cinemablend may be onto something in pointing out that the pop-culture references and gamer culture in-jokes may have been a little esoteric for the cinemagoing populace at large, but I don’t think too much specialized knowledge was really required to “get” the movie. Yes, you’ll appreciate recognizing some Zelda music during one dream sequence, but knowing the music is from Zelda isn’t really necessary. The really esoteric references have been stripped in the adaptation from comic book to movie. (My favorite scene in the entire comic series shows Ramona getting dressed to go out, generally ignoring her boyfriend, while he drones on about a particular X-Men comic in which Wolverine gets crucified.) By focusing more on rock music in the plot and fairly generic 8-bit game imagery in the visual style, the movie tapped into common media tropes that should’ve been recognizable to most American moviegoers, from those who lament that punk is dead to those who actually shop at Hot Topic.

I’ve heard people suggest other reasons for why Scott Pilgrim didn’t do better, like how so many who were dying to see it saw advance screenings at Comic Con and local theaters (such as myself). It’s a fair point, but there’s no way that accounts for the $24 million gap between #5 and #1 on the weekend box office take (or even the $13 million difference between #5 and #2, Eat Pray Love, which I’ve never even seen an ad for).

Besides the possible issues of how accessible this content really is, then, I see a couple other things going on here.

One factor in Scott Pilgrim‘s reception is a backlash against the image of the “hip nerd.” A recent NPR piece on “‘Scott Pilgrim’ versus the Unfortunate Tendency to Review the Audience” gives a hint at how sick some critics (and perhaps, by extension, some moviegoers) are getting of the nerd image:

After referring to the first part of the movie as a “dork-pandering assault,” The Boston Phoenix reviewer goes on to say that Michael Cera’s performance is “irritating” in part because of “the non-stop Pavlovian laugh track provided by the audience at the screening I attended.” (As far as I know, that’s a first: “You made the audience laugh, you irritating actor in a comedy, and that’s what’s wrong with you.”)

The review in the St. Petersburg Times begins, “First of all, I’m not a video gamer. I have discovered more appealing ways to not have a life.”

The New York Observer sniffs that the film is “clearly directed at an audience with generational ADD.”

Here’s one from Philadelphia Weekly: “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is Fan Service: The Movie, an insular, punishingly alienating experience preaching only to the faithful, devoted hearts of arrested 12-year-old boys. It’s singularly fixated on video games and shallow visions of women as one-dimensional objects to be either obtained or discarded and offers no possible point of entry to anybody over the age of 30.”

I can see how some viewers would get sick of seeing nerdy heroes lately, as that seems to be the bulk of what we’re getting in some genres, and Scott Pilgrim is the most celebratory of the bunch. This trend is reviewed somewhat in “‘Scott Pilgrim’: The End of the Nerd as We Know Him,” in which a Salon writer suggests that the titular character is a “Nerd in Name Only” (or “NINO”). The author was pretty far off in his prediction that Scott Pilgrim would beat The Expendables, but otherwise does a decent job of summarizing how the geek image has been mainstreamed and monetized.

That said, calling Scott a “NINO” (“Nerd in Name Only”) kind of misses the point of what we mean when we call ourselves nerds, but in the author’s defense, his appears to be an outsider perspective. The truth of the matter is that the pop culture image of the nerd is finally catching up to the self-image of the nerd, now that arch-geeks like Edgar Wright are at the helm of blockbuster movies. We the dorks are starting to realize, as a culture, that we are kind of neat. The self-image of the nerdy adult may include gentle, humorous, and honest self-deprecation, but it doesn’t preclude dating. It sees creative talents, like being in a kick-ass band, as part of being a nerd, not mutually exclusive with it. Its sees understanding of truly esoteric pop culture references as markers of authenticity, a shout-out to fellow nerds who know that what we are now is influenced by what we were as kids.

Calling Scott Pilgrim “dork-pandering” is unkind, but not entirely inaccurate. At least Judd Apatow’s movies have the sense to show their lovable losers getting knocked around, insulted, and embarrassed. None have the gall to introduce the protagonist with a label reading, “Rating: Awesome.” To a viewer or critic who isn’t ready to stop dismissing dorks as losers, I can see how a movie that shows geeks how we see ourselves would seem ridiculous.

I don’t think, though, that Scott Pilgrim‘s disappointing performance can be blamed only on “nerd disdain.” This leads me to the second factor I’d like to suggest. Remember how many times you watched The Phantom Menace before you realized it wasn’t as awesome as you thought? Well, Scott Pilgrim is no Episode I, but it did have some pretty major flaws.

I know I am inviting some serious flaming on this one. Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun, and it was funny. I laughed several times, mostly at lines I remembered from the comic book. But let’s be frank: The basic plot—boy meets girl, boy fights enemies to be with girl—was generic. And, perhaps most problematic, the pacing was extremely rushed. Hollywood movies have a very codified sense of pacing that audiences have come to expect. (Watch The Mutant Chronicles sometime for an example of a movie that ignores this at its own peril.) When the reviewer cited in that blockquote above notes that it was made for those with “generational ADD,” I think that’s a critique of the transitions as much as the audience. The movie jumps from scene to scene with reckless abandon, featuring a non-stop energy that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. If the filmmakers hadn’t been so concerned with being true to the comic, there’s no way there would have been a full seven evil exes. There just wasn’t time for them all.

I wonder whether the movie dropped the ball attracting those nerds who weren’t already reading the comic and plugged into the hype surrounding this. If you weren’t already looking forward to it, but still belonged to the hip/nerdy potential target market, I think the best that could be said of the movie was summed up in that Salon piece mentioned above: “The film is empty-headed and utterly devoid of drama, yet aesthetically elating.” That was my own main disappointment with the movie, though not really a surprising one to me: It was fun, but emotionally and thematically vapid compared to the comic book.

This may be a bad thing for the movie, but it’s at least somewhat heartening when you think about the development of traditionally geeky media more generally. The reason I love that scene with Scott babbling on about an X-Men comic to Ramona is because it feels awkwardly, painfully real and familiar. It’s a piece of the drama of their relationship, something that goes beyond the generic “defeat the baddies, get the girl” plot. The Scott Pilgrim movie had to focus on “boss fights” to reach the end, while the Scott Pilgrim comics had a lot more wiggle room to explore the experience of being a directionless twenty-something trying to figure out how friendships and relationships are supposed to work.

I think that point is a major part of what’s missing from so many of the cultural critiques about the ascendency of the nerd to the “pop culture overlord,” in the words of that Salon piece. Yes, “geek chic” has a great deal to do with marketers and content producers finally realizing that geeks represent an audience eager to spend money on media. But it’s also important to note that this also represents a sort of ascendency of traditionally geeky media to something more complex, more sophisticated, more—well, adult.

It’s delightful to hear Zelda music in a dream sequence and to see foes burst into coinage when defeated on the big screen. Blockbusters can’t always sail on mere delight. We all know it’ll make a killing in DVD sales, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not the sign of the Revenge of the Nerds that so many thought was foretold. At the end of the day, though, at least we can reassure ourselves that it was a much better adaptation than LXG.

From Games to Comics: I saw a few people (including my buddy Dan) link this Kotaku post about an Apple patent for a technology that would turn your video game stories into comic books through a series of screen shots. The example used in the patent is clearly from Mass Effect, with the implication being that this is most intended for games where the player gets to choose how the story unfolds, so each comic created would be about a player’s own, personal story.

Kotaku seems pretty jazzed about the idea. Personally, I’m confident this would result in many terrible comic books that might make us realize just how disjointed video game plots tend to be. Maybe that’s a good thing, though, as it might encourage better stories in games in the long run. As I mentioned in a recent post, for instance, Alpha Protocol and Heavy Rain both foreshadow things that the game might never deliver on again later, depending on what choices you make. We forgive that kind of poor storytelling in games because it’s a concession to player choice and because games are often so long that we forget what happened earlier. I think we would notice those kinds of plot holes and paths leading to nowhere if we could revisit the stories in another format.

With Great Power: A BBC article summarizes a study by Sharon Lamb describing how superheroes make poor role models for boys. (I can’t find just one article, as the study seems to have been presented at a conference and possibly derived from the book Packaging Boyhood.) The researchers suggest that it’s problematic that so many comic book heroes are either hypermasculine jerks or lazy slackers, as they present poor role models to boys.

What I found particularly interesting, though, was that the researchers don’t seem to be condemning superhero comics altogether, but sort of commenting on how the “dark and gritty” move since the ’90s has resulted in male characters with less depth and emotional vulnerability. I imagine that there are examples of heroes that don’t fit this “problematic” mold nowadays, and I’ve never been one to suggest that material for adults should be changed or restricted in order to provide “healthy” material for kids, but I thought it was some interesting food for thought. In a way, Lee and Ditko’s Spider-man was a real nerd role model for readers, but I imagine those are harder to find in comics today.

Catching up with the Trend: The BBC also asks “Will Geeks Inherit the Earth?” (with regard to politics and business). The Guardian muses on “The Geek Stranglehold on Cinema” (which may be debatable after Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s unimpressive box office take this past weekend). CNN asks: “Geeks: Smart, Harmless, Authentic, Exploited?” Adweek notes that “Consumers Embrace Geekdom,” and Businessweek reflects on ThinkGeek: The Home of Geek Chic.” (I am pretty sure these came from Church, who sends me so many interesting links that I lose track of them.)

The Psychology of Geek Community: Psychology Today offers some words on how Comic Con offers a community for geeks and nerds. The article notes…

The folks at the convention may use the Internet to create their own virtual communities of like-minded “friends” (I use the term friends loosely, in much the same way as Facebook does). But there is something about stepping into a convention center, an exhibit hall, and a hotel, knowing that you share an interest with almost everyone there.

… And handily sums up about two or three chapters of my dissertation. Turns out I can be pretty wordy!

“Why does everyone automatically assume I know tailoring and cooking?”: Geek Feminism reposts an incisive critique of issues of sexism in World of Warcraft and gamer/geek culture more broadly, “I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery.”

I have a bunch more links about Scott Pilgrim, but I’m thinking that deserves its own post after I get some other work done.

Games & Culture. The first panel of the weekend for me was one of those I most looked forward to, and not just because two of my Annenberg compatriots were presenting. As it turned out, though, their papers were particularly interesting to me.

Adrienne Shaw, presenting on “Putting the Gay in Games,” discussed the representation (or general lack thereof) of homo- and bisexual characters in video games. As one audience member pointed out (and as Adrienne has addressed in a recently revised version), there are of course plenty of players who will read queer relationships into games, but this really isn’t any substitute for having that built into the narrative.

Adrienne’s argument may make some roll their eyes—those who don’t fully understand systematic social and cultural marginalization may complain that video games are no place for politics, but even concerned queer gamers have countered that calls for representation for its own sake could too easily lead to tokenism. As Adrienne points out, however, there’s a real storytelling issue here that affects the market for all of us: You don’t have to be G, L, B, or T to think it’d be worth it to have the option to play some characters who are. Personally, playing Mass Effect as a female helped me realize how interesting it is to play a protagonist even slightly outside the normal archetype for science-fiction, action gaming. I’m kind of tired of playing the same heterosexual macho, male, messianic superhero again and again, aren’t you?

In the same panel, Joel Penny presented on “Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and the Ideology of the Military.” This study provided a great example of the multiple appeals of gaming we’ve talked about on this blog, illustrating how different players approach the same games differently. Some players he interviewed reported gaining a greater appreciation of soldiers from World War II video games, and highly valued such games for their historical accuracy and narrative force. Others, on the other hand, were so much more concerned with gameplay mechanics and weaponry/toys over other elements that they dismissed WWII as boring.

I’d be quite interested to see how players understand the experience of playing Axis soldiers in games that allow you to do so. (I remember a conversation at Penny Arcade, awhile back, surrounding Gabe’s grandfather, a WWII vet, not understanding why anybody would want to do this.) Perhaps this only comes up in multiplayer situations when gameplay is at the forefront of people’s minds, and “Axis” and “Allies” are as neutral as “red” versus “blue,” with no concern for narrative implications. Still, chatting with some friends about this, I found it interesting how people noted that new World of Warcraft players tend to skew towards the “good” (“Alliance”) races instead. It’s one thing to have a hard time actually committing evil actions in a game gives you the option to do so, and subsequently recognizes your character evil or “renegade” (like Mass Effect and certain Star Wars games). But it’s an even greater testament to the narrative power of games, I think, if characteristics of the avatar and its backstory are sufficient to guide what a player feels comfortable doing with that character.

Incidentally, my youngest brother text messaged me during this 9:00 AM panel to brag that he beat “Psychobilly Freakout” on Expert level on his first try, and then “Free Bird” on his third try, in Guitar Hero 2. Clearly, “Game Studies” runs in the family.

Media Literacy and the Health and Well-Being of Children. Ever since doing a literature review on how communication researchers understand the term ‘media literacy’ for a class a few years back, I’ve had an ongoing personal interest in the topic, and I’ve been looking forward to discussing it more as I teach. One branch of media literacy researchers in communication is particularly concerned with staging “interventions”—videos, workshops, or entire curricula—designed to teach children about how media work, with the hopes of enabling children to critically assess and perhaps produce their own visual messages. Most such curricula that I’ve read about stress that television ads are designed to convince you to buy something and that food packaging is actively misleading, but stop short of telling students not to buy any particular toys or foods.

Ever since I wrote that media literacy lit review, I’ve had one lingering concern: Media literacy interventions test for learning, but not for effects. I think it should not surprise us that if you teach one class some stuff about media, and then test them later on the course material, they’ll do better at the test than the control group who doesn’t get a class. What I want to know, though, is what skills this translates to outside of a test-taking, classroom setting. Seeing as how such curricula seem to get government funding at least in part due to claims that they provide children with psychological resistance to misleading ad messages—a public health concern, as the panel of this title indicates—I’ve been dying to see a study that actually tests whether these curricula actually have that effect.

This panel provided just that study, and the result was even more cleverly and robustly designed than I’d imagined. Ariel Chernin, a recent Annenberg graduate, presented a paper co-written with her advisor, Bob Hornik, which tested two things: Can an instructional video teach kids that commercials are meant to persuade you, and if so, does being taught about persuasive intent make kids less susceptible to persuasion?

The previous presentation on the panel, by Cynthia Scheibe, offered some evidence that young children can be taught about persuasive intent, contrary to the claims of some developmental psychologists and anti-advertising advocates. Ariel’s presentation offered additional evidence for this, showing a bit of the video that kids watched, which explained rather plainly that ads are trying to make you buy stuff. (The control group got a video with Bill Nye talking about plants.) Two weeks later, the kids came back to watch a cartoon with a commercial break, and answered a number of questions so they wouldn’t be aware they were specifically being questioned about ad content. And, contrary to the assumptions of media literacy researchers and instructors, the group that saw the video was actually more persuaded by the advertising than the group that didn’t.

This may have just been an effect of priming (or some related psychological phenomenon), whereby the kids who saw the video had been thinking more about advertising already (even after two weeks!), and so ended up paying more attention to ads. It wasn’t the result I was expecting, though, and certainly wasn’t the result most media literacy researchers expect, so it was all rather exciting for me.

Respondent Renee Hobbs, a well-known media literacy researcher, noted that this panel shows that media literacy is now out of its “infancy” and into its “toddlerhood,” and remarked that it’s important for media literacy curricula to be more wide-ranging in its messages—not just telling kids “commercials make you want to buy stuff,” but also teaching production skills, for example. I wonder, though, if the effects of an entire curriculum might just be deeper and longer-term than the effects of a single video, like the one Ariel showed. And, of course, we need to ask whether resistance to persuasion should be the prioritized goal of media literacy education, or whether the potential of increased susceptibility to ad messages is a small price to pay for learning other skills and information. It would be interesting to see whether a (relatively) short-term effect of increased susceptibility to mediated persuasion during childhood actually translates into (variously positive or negative) ongoing effects down the line. What if the kids getting media literacy education are a little more easily persuaded now, but much more media-savvy and critical as adults, thanks to the head start? All in all, I see a lot of interesting possibilities for additional research in this area.

The Impact of Visual Communication: Networking the Power of the Visual and Visual Communication Studies Division Business Meeting and Game Studies Special Interest Group Business Meeting. The first of these meetings was a roundtable session that sought to question and best understand the points of commonality and complements between the various disciplines implied in “visual communication studies.” The second was a discussion about that division’s past, present, and (projected) future membership. The third was about an entirely different division, discussing at times what its own membership could agree upon. For me, the resulting discussions were interesting not only for what they set out to discuss, but just as much for what they got me thinking about: namely, how academic communities of knowledge arrange themselves.

Conferences like ICA are organized into divisions (e.g., Mass Communication) and special interest groups (SIGs, e.g., Game Studies). Divisions, by virtue of having more members, are allowed to host more panels, and get more funding from the association. The upshot of this system is that SIGs are generally trying to get approved as divisions, and divisions are trying to maintain membership so they don’t get bumped back to SIGs. Meanwhile, there’s a debate surrounding whether it should be more difficult to start up new SIGs, perhaps because the existing divisions are concerned that having so many new SIGs dilutes membership among existing divisions. Those in favor of allowing relatively easy SIG startup, on the other hand, contend that new SIGs are often the hotbeds for the creative thinking and new ideas in the field at large.

I’m still too new to ICA to comment on this very intelligently, but from what I have seen so far, it’s important to make a distinction between starting new SIGs for the purpose of fostering new ideas, and starting new SIGs that replicate the function of existing divisions. There is a lot of the latter going on in some other academic organizations, surrounded by gossipy tales about political rifts between administrators. I haven’t really noticed this at ICA, though. New SIGs include groups like Game Studies, which often studies media in ways completely ignored by other communication researchers and theorists. (Outside this division, the only papers about games tend to stick to studying whether they make kids violent or whether they can be used to teach lessons about health.) I think it will be a great day when modes of thinking circulating in Game Studies have percolated into the field at large enough that a separate group for just this medium won’t be needed anymore—but for now, it is serving an important purpose.

It can be tricky for some divisions and SIGs to feel like they’re competing for members. I think one short-term solution, at least, would be to host more poster presentations at conferences like ICA. This year’s acceptance rate was a bit low for a conference of this type, I think, at about 43% overall. Visual Communication Studies could particularly benefit from an increased number of poster sessions, given the nature of what folks are presenting. I might have preferred one myself to a high-density session, though there could be a note when people submit about whether one’s presentation is likely to include moving images that would work better projected from a computer. I do applaud ICA for attempting to make poster sessions feel less like the conference ghetto, with such efforts like the cash prize for best poster.

That’s just my two cents for now, anyway. I imagine I’ll mull on this further as I get more deeply involved with certain divisions and attend more conferences.

Digital Mediations of Personal Narratives. This panel discussed “digital storytelling” insofar as online scrapbooking, Facebook, MySpace, and other such services constitute the construction of “personal narrative” online. It should be no surprise, perhaps, that I have more to say now about what I read between the lines than about the original papers themselves (though I do recommend downloading the original papers if you are an ICA member).

During audience Q&A, someone raised a question about what “storytelling” really means. As I’ve alluded to elsewhere on this blog, storytelling and narrative are hotly contested terms in certain disciplines, and referring to a Facebook page as a “narrative” is bound to raise some hackles. I’m comfortable enough, though, with the idea of a “personal narrative” as distinct from an “authorial narrative” (or whatever you call those stories actually intentionally structured as stories), so I’ll leave that debate aside.

What really interested me was the implied follow-up question: What’s so “digital” about “digital storytelling”? I plan to revisit the broader question behind this—what we mean in communication research and theory when we discuss “digital” media—in a paper for next year’s ICA (if not sooner), which will be be investigating the theme of “keywords in communication.” For now, though, I’d just like to throw out a couple quick thoughts.

When we discuss “digital storytelling” with regard to Facebook—or even other web applications that more readily lend themselves to traditional narrative, such as Blogger and WordPress—the “digital” part refers largely to advances in ease of production and transmission. Because digital messages are easily and quickly transmitted over long distances, and simultaneously accessible and copyable from multiple points, it’s relatively quick and cheap for producers to create media and share it widely. For some media forms that actually do seek audiences, such developments do, of course, lead to advances for the consumer as well. Notably, this includes potentially less expensive products (thanks to the lower overhead for producers), and a broader array of consumables to choose from (thanks to the enlarged market of newly-enabled producers).

Contrast this with how we might understand “digital storytelling” in a medium like video games. Here, “digital” does not necessarily invoke images of democratization among producers and the related broadening of markets with countless niches to choose from. We can see this somewhat at work with Flash games and “casual games,” perhaps, but, for the most part, this kind of digital storytelling has yet to be as fully automated; interaction with the code of programs is still at the forefront of considerations for content creators. The “stories” told by amateurs in digital form are still pretty easily distinguishable from the stories told by professionals backed by giant studios, despite how well text-based websites may have blurred this line for books, and online video may have blurred it for film. And, while the internet does indeed broaden access to downloadable and web-based games, these are not necessarily the best representations of “digital storytelling”—computer and console games that are still locked down with DRM and sold via retail do not really match our other understanding of “digital” as connected to the speed and ease of use of the internet.

These are just a couple preliminary thoughts for a more in-depth project, of course, inspired by works like Krippendorff’s metaphors of communication, Downes and McMillan’s article on defining interactivity, and Sterne’s book chapter questioning what’s “digital” in digital music. I’m pretty excited about next year’s ICA theme; leave it to incoming president Barbie Zelizer (Annenberg’s “Raymond Williams Professor of Communication”) to encourage researchers and theorists to collaboratively compile an updated Keywords for the field.

Visuals From an Artistic Perspective. As for my own session at this conference, I presented a paper on experimental comics and visual language alongside presentations about architecture, ethonographic/art films, the photography of Jacob Riis, and electronic color techniques from years past. It was an interesting mix, but I didn’t really get a chance to mull over the conceptual bridges between these because there is no Q&A following such “high density” sessions.

For my own part, at least, I wish I hadn’t lost the last two pages of my notes immediately before my presentation, but I think I recovered gracefully enough. (Hopefully nobody minded me announcing, “And now we reach the uncharted territory of me presenting without my notes,” as a means of gathering my wits and my nerve for the final stretch.) One very pared down version of the paper has already been submitted for journal review, but if you’re interested, you can download the presentation slides and the notes (including the last two pages!) here.

One thing I never really had time to get into in either the presentation or the paper is the contrast between the development of the conventions of comic books and video games. In this paper, you see, I argue that feelings of cultural marginalization have led alternative comic artists to experiment with the basic formal conventions of the medium, rallied behind a common notion of comics as a “visual language,” or, similarly, as “sequential art.” This is a particularly ahistorical understanding of the medium, actively discounting single-panel works traditionally known as comics (like Family Circus and The Far Side) in favor of a formal definition that still leaves lots of possibilities for diverse work. Some comic artists have gone even further, trying to actively cut themselves off from other traditional comics material like superhero stuff, happy to call their work by other terms entirely to suggest different artistic pretensions (e.g., graphic novels).

Video game theorists, so far as I can tell, have attempted no similar feat of rallying behind a common definition that cuts out any “unwanted” crowd. This is interesting to me, as there’s a great deal more formal disparity within this medium than within comics. The line between your average alternative comic and your average superhero comic is significantly less blurry than the line between your average puzzle game and your average video RPG, but at least one journalist still boldly proclaimed at one point that “Maus is not a comic book.” How hard (or even desirable) would it be, I wonder, for some like-minded groups of game designers to suddenly proclaim that they’re working on “progressional art”? Games without a player-guided narrative progression simply wouldn’t count as part of their artistic movement anymore, and the stated goal of this movement would be to explore all the different things one could do with “progression” as the one formal constant to experiment around.

Would we see something like we’ve seen with comics in recent years? The break between these sides of the medium hasn’t been permanent, or even very long-lived. Superhero comics have been welcomed back into the fold of the “graphic novel” shelf eventually, of course, but the break in between arguably gave alternative and art comics the space they needed to get mainstream magazines, book stores, and libraries thinking of the medium as worthy of adult attention. It’s possible that video games would benefit similarly from such a movement, but it’s hard to imagine such a move happening. As my paper presented at ICA argues, after all, this was largely able to happen in comics because of the influence of a few, particularly high-profile creators who were pretty much able to do the work to prove their point, relatively free of the pressures upon more profitable media. There are some influential game designers, of course, but games are much more collaborative products, and the market is much more demanding of blockbusters.

This is the argument I wanted to make in a paper, but it requires so much background knowledge that to get into the nuances of it, I’d need to write one to two other papers first. Such are the minor annoyances of academic brevity, I suppose. And brevity, as this post surely indicates, is a condition from which I have clearly never suffered.

1. Gaming clothing seems to be the largest category of overtly geek-branded apparel.

Sure, just about every comic store you go into has Punisher t-shirts, but those shirts aren’t necessarily being sold on “nerdy clothing” websites, or actively being linked to by websites that tend to broadly market themselves as geeky/nerdy. (I’ve always been fascinated by how commenters react when gaming blogs dish up posts on gaming shirts.)

Why gaming? I suppose it’s the geek activity that has the most crossover appeal into mainstream audiences, especially thanks to broader nostalgia value that 20- to 30-somethings find in retro gaming merchandise. That sense of nostalgia fits very well with the trend in contemporary fashion to make pre-worn “vintage”-looking t-shirts—the “Salvation-Army-cum-Urban-Outfitters” look.

Sci-fi movies also have crossover appeal with mainstream audiences, but I guess there are fewer sci-fi “classics” known to the general populace in film than video game “classics.” I do know that Urban Outfitters currently has some vintage-looking Star Wars shirts in stock, though.

2. Geeky tees seem a good match for user-generated content.

I’ve noticed that Threadless has always had the occasional nerdy product, but a bunch seemed to pop up in rapid succession for awhile. They also seemed, to me, to take on a similar tone to the shirts at more specifically geek-marketed sites, like ThinkGeek and J!NX.

Sites like J!NX have always promised some reward if you come up with an idea for a shirt and they use it, but isn’t really as built into their business model to the same extent as Threadless. Now, though, Nerdy Shirts is apparently adopting the Threadless business model, more fully embracing the idea of selling user-generated clothing.

This model kind of makes sense for geek stores, in some ways, considering that it’s often the most hardcore fans who both want clothing proclaiming their interests and want to make stuff related to their interests. The question, I think, is whether other sites can provide visitors with the feeling that even those whose shirts don’t get picked still get something out of participating and submitting. Threadless, being more designer/illustrator driven, at least offers the promise of feedback and communication with fellow designers. Fans who don’t feel like being a designer is part of their identity might not care as much about this element.

3. ‘Geek’ is sometimes used to refer to a hipster with a certain style.

Or perhaps I should say that a ‘hipster’ is a geek with a certain style..? Anyway, I have noticed a few online stores that mention somewhere in their written copy that they are for “geeks,” but have a much more fashion- and trend-conscious bent than that term might normally imply. See, for example, Your Eyes Lie (“For Freaks, Geeks, Jocket Sluts and Suzy Creamcheese”).

Some sites, meanwhile, kind of straddle the lines between hipster stores, joke tee stores, and more narrowly branded geeky tee stores, like Tees My Body” (for “dirty, nerdy geeks” in search of a “vintage-looking funny tee”), Noisebot (which has an entire “geek” category alongside “sports,” “politics,” and others), and Busted Tees (which has a “geek” shirt and a “lambda lambda lambda” shirt referencing Revenge of the Nerds).

I guess this is further evidence for the oft-claimed point that “anybody can be a geek nowadays.” Is there any tension there, though? Do some geeks resent that anybody can be a geek, or just that jocks can now claim to be geeks? (I know there is some resentment there. Ask me sometime about the “jock simulator” pitch at PAX.)

4. Nothing says “I’m a geek” like getting some ink.

For the young hipster geek afraid to commit (or just looking for a lark), Geekadelphia reports that Urban Outfitters now offers temporary tattoos for geeks. In the comments following that Geekadelphia post, however, Alex of Dangerously Awesome reminds us that “real geek ink” is cooler.

I’ve linked to some geeky tattoos here before, but I think I missed Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium. It features a mix of contributors; as one the tattoo-owner in one post notes, “I’m not a scientist by trade, but I am, in fact, a huge nerd.”

I feel like the geek tattoos I see more than any others are science tattoos and gaming tattoos, perhaps in descending order. That makes a certain sense to me: Science notation will likely remain unchanging for the duration of the tattoo owner’s life span, and most of the gaming tattoos I see are of retro games already, so they too have a claim to a certain sort of timelessness. And both, of course, make a sort of bid for authenticity of the wearer—”I have this special knowledge” or “I was there before games were big.”

Then again, I haven’t seen a lot of comic book tattoos, but something tells me there may be more Superman “S” shields inked on people than gaming tattoos of any sort. Does it “count” as a geeky tattoo if you weren’t doing it out of geek pride?

Ultimately, I think we might agree more than we disagree. As I said in the original post, I don’t think all our media has to have high-brow pretensions, and I do think that adults are entitled to media that seek to do no more than to entertain (even in ways that seem juvenile to some). But it is still interesting to discuss whether the motivation to be seen as “legitimate” is even worth it.

I think there are three motivations behind the drive to make a medium seem “legitimate,” at least two of which Matt specifically notes:

1. The cultural reason, to borrow the wording from Matt’s post, is that people (especially artists/content creators) want the medium to be seen as capable of high-brow material.
2. The economic reason, which Matt also points out, is that certain industries may need to reach into broader markets to maintain financial viability.
3. And the personal reason (just to throw out one more term) is that people don’t want to have to feel embarrassed about admitting to liking things they really care about.

These motivation for trying to promote a medium as “legitimate” often overlap in people’s minds and in their means of promotion. Art Spiegelman, for example, has vocally tried to promote comics in institutions that recognize “high art,” though largely out of economic concerns; getting comics into these “game preserves” of culture makes sure that the medium survives financial ruin, even as superhero publishers seemed unwilling or unable to reach out to broader markets in the ’80s and ’90s in particular. Meanwhile, at one panel I attended at Comic Con, a panelist explained that fans like himself promote the medium because it would just be nice to not feel the need to hide that interest outside of cons like that one. (If you’re interested in this kind of thing, let me know; I’m presenting a related paper at the International Communication Association conference this May.)

So, getting back to Matt’s critique, certain questions remain: Do we really need this kind of promotion, and couldn’t efforts to legitimize a medium actually hurt it? Well, I think that the comics industry has done well to have been subtly promoted in some ways, though certain aggressive kinds of promotion are probably more harmful than helpful. Working to promote a medium for any of the above reasons can potentially backfire, but I don’t think that that’s necessarily always the case.

Promoting a medium for personal reasons isn’t wrong in itself, I think, but it’s probably pretty easy to imagine backfiring. Nothing says “weird” more than fervently trying to convince others that you’re not weird. I think I’ve been guilty of this myself, actually. I was big into “comics activism” as a college student, and some of my efforts probably came off better than others. Founding a grant-funded student comics anthology is all well and good, and handing out “comics you would like” flyers in the campus center was actually better received than I would’ve expected. By the same token, the latter sort of effort might have just creeped some people out, though—why are all these comics geeks trying so hard to convince me I’d like to read comics too? When your motivation is obviously the desire to seem more socially acceptable, that can come across as desperate to outsiders. That’s not good PR for anybody involved.

Promoting a medium for economic concerns may seem more defensible, though there are ways this could backfire as well. Some degree to adult acceptability is necessary to get grant funding for interesting experimental projects, to attract investors who could fund mainstream projects, and, perhaps most importantly, to tap into multiple consumer markets. For a medium like comics, where the collapse of a single major publisher could have conceivably toppled the entire specialty market, fiscal motivations are nothing to sneeze at. Trying too hard to capture an “adult” demographic can lead to formulaic approaches, however, such as when the American comics market became flooded with titles that unfortunately assumed Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns were successful because they were disturbing and violent.

Matt’s concern, though, was specifically about promoting a medium for cultural concerns, trying to get it regarded as high art. The example he offers for this comes from jazz—a cautionary tale about how trying too hard to characterize something as “Art” can ultimately make it inaccessible to the popular audiences it once entertained so well. It’s a valid concern, like the other examples of backfired promotional efforts suggested above. That said, I think it’s the least problematic of the concerns noted here, at least when applied to traditionally geeky popular media like comics and games.

When you consider jazz in context of its entire medium—music—you see that that medium already offers well-known precedents for high art (e.g., classical, opera). Perhaps the aggressive attempt to legitimize a popular genre doomed it, so to speak, to move into that “high art” category of music completely. Most geeky media, however, don’t have that category at all, at least as far as the general populace is aware of. The specific works that do get elevated to “high” art tend to be considered as separate from their genre, rather than elevating the entire genre. (Consider that 1984 and 2001: A Space Odyssey tend not to get shelved in the Science-Fiction section of chain book stores, and recall the famous proclamation by one critic that “Maus is not a comic book.”)

In other words, losing a geeky medium or genre entirely to the “Art world” is still at least two steps away; most don’t even have a foot in the door yet. Until geeky media do seem in greater danger of being equated entirely with “high” art, promoting such media as having artistic pretensions is unlikely to do little more than gently nudge public perception here and there (and may even help produce the occasional grant-funded video game).

Now, all of that said, consider too that promoting a medium as “artsy” is just one of several possible techniques of promotion. As media, comics and (narrative) games are generally dominated by a few genres with niche appeal and juvenile stereotypes. Promoting such media as “legitimate” for adult use is sometimes just a matter of popularizing the notion they are capable of more variety—and thus reaching more audiences—than what the general populace expects.

Some people are still surprised to hear that there are comic books without funny animals or superheroes, but the rise of the “graphic novel” has helped alleviate this. Similarly, if narrative games could offer plots that don’t lean on shooting people, aliens, and/or monsters, this would help encourage the notion that the medium and its industry have more than one audience in mind.

Again, I totally agree that geeky media have great use and purpose for the geeks who are already enjoying them. I don’t think you or I or anybody else should have to give up Halo 3 and Mass Effect just because killing aliens to protect the galaxy has been done before. I don’t think, though, that making material that appeals to other audiences would really threaten the production of such material. Consider that there’s no dearth of geeky, big-budget sci-fi among Hollywood’s contemporary output, even though there’s plenty of variety in film—including a category for “artsy” material. On the contrary, the artsy stuff often brings a new sensibility to the blockbuster stuff, such as when you get indie film geeks working on the mainstream properties (Raimi on Spider-man, Jackson on Lord of the Rings, Favreau on Iron Man, etc.).

Of course, as consumers, it’s not really our job to promote our favorite media to new audiences and in new ways; someone else is getting paid to do that. Still, I can’t help but think out loud about how things could be, perhaps should be, because I feel invested in the products of the geeky media industries. So I guess that suggests a fourth reason one might want to promote a medium: hoping that more variety eventually results in a more enjoyable product even for the geeks.

Blogging for Health, Knowledge, Fame: Grand Text Auto has a really interesting experiment going in blog-based peer review. Graphic Engine offers some thoughts on the benefits of academic blogging. Sterneworks.org offers some helpful DOs and DON’Ts for the would-be academic blogger. And, though not specifically related to academics, you may be interested in this report on recent research that suggests that people who blog and use social networking sites feel happier and more connected to others.

Gamers Striking Out: Awhile back, Fox News got someone on the air to slam Mass Effect for being sexually obscene. As Seth Schiesel explains, however, the person they put on camera was clueless, and gamers struck back by tanking the reviews of her book on Amazon.

Also, I was totally fascinated by this Wired article on griefers. I’m not sure how much of this kind of behavior is about being a jerk versus making an ideological statement (i.e., “don’t take your game world too seriously”), but it certainly raises some interesting questions.

These two stories don’t have very much in common, but to me, they both seem like examples of how you can make a statement with real impact by subverting the norms of online behavior.

Sort-of Real Superheroes: One link (courtesy Hipster, Please!) from way back on people who dress up like superheroes in real life, and one link (via Emily and others) about the superhero-themed restaurant coming to my own city of Philadelphia. Also, Michael Chabon writes about superhero costumes for the New Yorker (which I’ll probably return to in another post later).

Rebranding an Otaku Magazine: Kind of in the same tradition of Wizard now openly billing itself as a “men’s pop culture magazine” (as noted here), ADV revamps PiQ to be about geek/otaku culture more broadly, branded as “entertainment for the rest of us, squarely addressing the needs of a cutting-edge young male audience” (link via Chris C.).

Geek Culture Is Now Bullies’ Culture Too: I was, I must admit, both repulsed and fascinated to read about bullies “teabagging” another boy at school. This is probably an indication that FPS gaming is “mainstream” children’s entertainment fare, not just being played by the nerds who get picked on. It’s also worth noting that the antisocial behavior that kids picked up from gaming has nothing to do with normal, in-game violence (involving shooting and elbowing in the face in Halo, for example), but a sort of “content” that players themselves generated.

1. Comics and games are “infantilized” because artsy content is the exception, with most of these media targeted to teenage boys;
2. But games “have more to achieve” as a medium, and some creators are pushing for that;
3. Moreover, dominance of the low-brow “isn’t inherent” to these media, but actually is common across all entertainment media;
4. And in the meantime, part of the problem is that consumers “expect too little” of games (as evidenced by Bioshock, which is not nearly as sophisticated as its reception might have suggested).

My response to this is sort of a follow-up to recent posts addressing the perceived immaturity or unmasculinity of geeky pursuits like games and comics. In short, I agree with just about all of these to some extent, but I’d contend that these stereotypes can be escaped through creative and marketing efforts. Just look at the “graphic novel.”

The work of people like Chris Ware may still be the minority of comics industry output, but I think that the work of a concerted group of creators and publishers has done wonders to transform public perception of comic art. It’s no small feat that graphic novels have won some major literary awards and occasionally see reviews in mainstream magazines alongside literary fiction. Nor did this happen overnight: One comic retailer told me that people used to come into his shop looking for more things like Maus, and it was years before he even had anything else to put in their hands.

I don’t think the video gaming medium has found its Maus yet (leaving alone its Citizen Kane)—a product that not only reaches beyond the typical audience (as the Wii has done), but also commands respect from critics as sophisticated and adult. Part of this is that the closest contenders in gaming are still too much a victim of their medium’s and genres’ stereotypes: I think Shadow of the Colossus was a milestone in thoughtful gameplay and storytelling, but still too steeped in fantasy imagery and the juvenile associations of its medium to reach broader audiences. You can make a bid for respectability and sophistication with fantasy books and fantasy film, but the idea of a thoughtful fantasy game may still seem a bit too childish. Arguably, this is part of why people will happily pay ten bucks to see Spider-man on a big screen, but won’t think of touching a Spider-man comic.

Another part of the problem is that even the most open-minded and intelligent critics could still face technical hurdles in getting to the impressive parts of the most impressive games. A friend of mine who doesn’t play video games—but has good taste in other media—told me she wants to try Shadow of the Colossus. I was glad that word of the game has made such an impression on her, but I secretly worried that, for an inexperienced player, the game might still present too much tedium and too much challenge for its central messages and themes to come across quickly and apparently enough. (I wonder, too, if it might have been a better game with half as many colossi. Perhaps the success of Portal will encourage more games to just get to the point.)

I’m not saying that we need games to be super-easy, or that we need a game about the Holocaust (which, incidentally, I don’t think would be as inappropriate as some contend; see Escape from Woomera, a grant-funded game about trying to escape from a real-world refugee camp). I’m not saying that adults shouldn’t be entitled to juvenile games, either (I think we are). I’m just saying that, if you want Anglophone culture to recognize games as “adult,” take a lesson from comics. Even the most sophisticated superhero comic isn’t about the win a Pulitzer. As cool as Bioshock was, something tells me that gaming’s Maus won’t involve shooting anybody.

Comics and Closets: Fellow Annenbergers Cabral and Paul F. send along an NYT article alerting me to Comic Book Club. The article begins:

At a recent performance of “Comic Book Club,” a weekly stage talk show at the People’s Improv Theater in Chelsea, an audience member declined to give his name. “I have family and friends,” he explained. “I’m a closeted geek.”

Alexander Zalben, 30, the show’s moderator, understood completely. Talking about being a comic book fan, he said, is “like coming out of the closet.” In fact Mr. Zalben only discovered that Justin Tyler, 28, another host, was a fellow aficionado when he spotted Mr. Tyler with a Midtown Comics bag. Pete LePage, 31, who rounds out the three, had a similar experience. “Justin busted me reading a comic,” he confessed.

The show, which celebrates its first anniversary Tuesday at 8 p.m., covers all things comic book, which these days also includes the worlds of video games, television and film. As that anonymous audience member put it, “It’s great to be in an atmosphere where you can sit and discuss these things without getting strange looks.”

I had thought the success of the “graphic novel” might have done away with this fear to some extent; when I talk to people about being “closet geeks,” RPGs come up more often than comics. I’d say the Midtown Comics bag is the right-ear-earring of comic geek culture, but of course, there was no implication here that the carrier of said bag wanted to get noticed. Incidentally, the show also has a segment titled “The Week in Geek,” and the regularly attending “fan” was reportedly “not happy” when the show went on hiatus for a few weeks and he was compelled to find a girlfriend in the down time.

French Geek Documentary: Chris C., a Geek Studies regular and stalwart co-founder of the UMass Comic Art Society, sends word from the News Askew blog that Kevin Smith will be discussing “such topics as the San Diego Con, geek culture, Simpsons ‘Vans’, and lots more” in a French documentary titled Suck My Geek. You can download the Kevin Smith portion here. The blog also reports that “The program was broadcast by the french Canal+ network … only in France,” and (aside from Kevin’s commentary) entirely in French, which I don’t speak. Still, I’m going to poke around on their website and some torrent sites, and if anybody has an easy idea how to get ahold of this (especially if in translation), please do let me know.

The Fight Against Voldemedia: You may have already heard (perhaps from Hipster, Please! or Pitchfork) about how Harry Potter fans and the Wizard rock community have been involved in efforts to fight media consolidation. I thought that this article in the Huffington Post, by the founder of the Harry Potter Alliance, was particularly worth checking out. Andrew Slack spells out pretty explicitly how and why this type of activist effort should be relevant to fans. I suspect that the vast majority of Harry Potter fans (which is an awful lot of people) could care less about such issues, but this does seem a potentially effective and sincere way of coating activist efforts with the themes from entertainment we find deeply affecting—much more so, anyway, than having Spider-man instruct kids to vote (when they’re old enough, I guess).

Music for Magicians: David Pescovitz at Boing Boing has a couple recent posts up about “occulture” music:

[Occulture is] a term for the space explored in recent years by a loose network of British electronic musicians. Groups like Mount Vernon Arts Lab and Raagnagrok are weaving together their interests in the occult, strange phenomena, fantastic fiction, and horror and translating the moody mindset into enchanting and/or challenging audio.

I’m not sure if this is geek music per se—seems a little more Alan Moore-ish than Neil Gaiman-ish in its roots—but it seemed potentially of interest.

The Diffusion and Evaluation of Geek Chic: Geekadelphia refers us to some neat Space Invaders rings. Curious as to how one might come across such a product, I followed the “via” link to Technabob, which in turn refers us to Geeksugar, a blog which I’ve seen before but I don’t think I’ve linked. I was particularly interested to see that Geeksugar—which belongs to the Sugar Inc. network of female-oriented consumer blogs—runs a series of posts tagged “Totally Geek or Totally Chic?” Visitors can vote in an informal poll on whether an item is “Totally Geeky,” “Geek Chic,” or “It’s so ______” (with the blank filled in the comments). I haven’t checked many of the products’ poll results (as you can’t just view results without voting yourself), but from the few I’ve glanced at, I wonder if fashion-oriented items get the most votes for “Geek Chic,” whereas more utilitarian items—the contemporary equivalents of pocket protectors—get dismissed as “totally geeky.” (Side note: I should’ve been following this blog before Christmas. It is a treasure trove of presents for my girlfriend.)

Sexiest Geeks Alive: Z. also refers me to Violet Blue’s top 10 sexiest geeks of 2007. Frontalot nabs the #2 spot, the highest ranked male on the list, with the #1 spot going to Veronica Belmont (who not only walks the walk and talks the talk, but sounds like she should be killing Dracula). I might’ve also given a nod to Schaffer the Dark Lord after seeing the video for “The Rappist” (courtesy Nerd World). Check the “update” at the end of Violet Blue’s post for other sites that have something to say about the list.

Science Tattoos: And as long as we’re talking about the chic and the sexy in the geek world today, check out this Flickr set assembled by a guy who wondered whether scientists get tattoos. The set includes molecule diagrams, complex equations, alchemical symbols, and more, with some comments by submitters.

Granted, the top 10 lists for comics and games were a little more mainstream-oriented than in some previous years. The games list only includes first-tier titles, not downloads (Pac-man CE, Space Giraffe, and flOw might have been contenders, for example). The graphic novel list features four titles by Marvel/DC (five if you count Wildstorm, distributed by DC). Andrew Arnold, who handled Time‘s graphic novels list in some previous years, focused more on indie titles, perhaps as part of his mission to introduce new audiences to comics they would be less likely to find out about otherwise. Perhaps such a mission seems less pressing now, in a time when the magazine has abandoned its artsy comics blog in favor of an overtly nerdy blog—or perhaps this is simply a reflection of one man’s tastes versus another’s.

Comics Activism in the University Library: Comixology offers the first part in a series on how one university librarian (whose job is not to build up the comics collection) rallies support among faculty to build up the library’s comics collection.

Geek Activism in the City Streets: Yahoo News reports on an effort to rename one city’s 42nd street after the late Douglas Adams. The motivating party behind this campaign is an online geek community (blog, forum, store) I was previously unaware of, Geek in the City.

Ugly Activism in Buenos Aires: A BBC article recounts the tale of Gonzalo Otalora, Argentine writer of Feo (“Ugly”) and semi-ironic “campaigner” for the rights and recognition of ugly people.

His book, Feo (Ugly), has just been republished and is selling well. On the inside cover is a picture of Gonzalo as a youth. It is not a pretty sight.

“I was a child with thick glasses, spots and braces,” he said. “The kids made fun of me at school.

“Later the girls rejected me in the discos. And then when I was looking for work, I felt so ugly and insecure that I was rejected again and left without a job.

“The great challenge in my life has been to stop being the school nerd—and thanks to my humour and bravery I’ve managed to overcome all that.”

That the focus here is on looks more so than braininess or interests may speak directly to regional differences in how ‘nerd’ is defined. Buenos Aires is particularly known (or residents think of it as being known) for its “beautiful” people.

Evolution of the Nerd: Z. passes on a link from Australia’s The Age which proclaims that Geeks Rule, OK. The article goes on to describe a variety of subgroups of geeks, and why geeks at large are now “the dominant force in popular culture.

All I Want For Christmas: Popular Science polled tech luminaries and internet celebrities while compiling its “ultimate for-geeks, by-geeks gift list.” Individuals polled include Jonathan Coulton, Jimmy Wales, Fake Steve Jobs, Wil Wheaton, Xeni Jardin, and others.

Usted es un Nerd Enorme: A sepulcher in new video game Uncharted contains a message in Spanish that reads:

If you are reading this grave, you’re a huge nerd. Please get a life and a girlfriend.

Kotaku crossed out part of the original response (which had sarcastically lambasted whoever thought that reading Spanish was nerdy), probably because comments that follow the post suggest that most readers found it more funny than offensive.

Virtual World Research, The Sequel: Slashdot notes that Edward Castronova’s Shakespearean virtual world, Arden, didn’t really work out as planned—there simply wasn’t enough interest from players. Now in the works: Arden II. The gaming/economics researcher reflected:

You need puzzles and monsters, or people won’t want to play … Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach.

I find his approach interesting, and I do think that online games could offer some fertile ground for research in economics, but I’d be nervous about extrapolating too much more about social/psychological research more broadly from behavior in a virtual world. Aside from that, my biggest concern is that experimentally manipulating the conditions between different servers of the same game would simply encourage people to jump ship to a new server, which would wreak havoc on your data. Still, I wish this project the best, and I’d be interested to see whether this yields any results on whether interpersonal behavior within virtual worlds maps well onto behavior in person vs. other online contexts.

The Ups and Downs of Transmedia Storytelling: Comics may represent the place where Hollywood goes for new ideas, but it also seems like the medium may represent the place where fan favorites go to die. Ever since Joss announced that Buffy would be seeing a canonic “season” in comics form—and, shortly thereafter, that Veronica Mars might also be resuscitated in this way—I have been particularly interested in how others might use comics to continue franchises that face major economic barriers in other media. Now, Slashdot reports that Joss Whedon’s Firefly franchise will be coming to comics—but ironically, that’s the format that fans may be least interested in seeing. This doesn’t surprise me too much; after all, Firefly was great largely because of its cast.

Net Linguistics: Nelson suggests some unusual emoticons from games, and follows up with some notes on the evolution of the <3 (“heart”) emoticon (latter link via Boing Boing). The <4 emoticon seems like a pretty classic example of how programmer thinking might influence linguistics, sort of a visual/textual equivalent of “love++.”

On a related note, Geek Gestalt notes that Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “w00t.” I’m not sure whether this is a sign that l33tspeak has moved into popular usage or whether this is an event that would actually encourage such a move, but it seemed noteworthy whatever the case.

Cons as Vacation Spots: MSN City Guides offers suggestions for a bunch of “geek getaways” based on different interests. It’s not entirely comprehensive or accurate (E for All was not bigger than PAX, despite high expectations), but it certainly does read more like a travel guide than the typical newspaper approach of marveling, year after year, that people are dressed up so funny-like and are drinking more than expected.

Don’t Watch Snakes on a Plane Alone: Slashdot refers us to a study suggesting that enjoying movies is contagious. The post quotes one researcher:

By mimicking expressions, people catch each other’s moods leading to a shared emotional experience. That feels good to people and they attribute that good feeling to the quality of the movie.

This is a different interpretation from what I expected. Personally, I’ll watch television alone, but I always wait for company to watch a movie. This article suggests that people give the movie credit for emotions that are actually cued by other people; I always thought of it more in terms of magnifying what I enjoy about a movie by being able to share it with people I care about, adding a new dimension to what is in the movie alone.

Games Teach You Useful Skills: A 12-year-old swedish boy outsmarted an elk, saving himself and his sister based on behavior learned in World of Warcraft (link via Boing Boing). I kind of liked the story better when I thought he had been attacked by a moose, but either way it’s pretty weird and impressive.