The field of game studies rests on how video game players use their relationships with their avatars to fulfill the goals of the game. From studies on the effects of violence in video games to examinations of serious games for entertainment and/or education, all areas presume a level of connection between player and the avatar they control. This relationship is first defined by the type of play style—that is, the approach the player takes when sitting down to play. Next is the avatar—the graphical representation of the player—that will differ drastically from game to game. Based on these two individuals, one actual the other simulated, a relationship of some sort is built. This relationship can be monadic, meaning the player fully identifies with the avatar to the point that they are the same being. In contrast, it could be dyadic, in which a separation exists between player and avatar more akin to a parasocial relationship (PSR). Further, some scholars have suggested that the relationship between player and avatar exists on a continuum known as player-avatar relationships. Concepts like presence and empathy can be used to predict the strength of the relationship between player and avatar. This bond is incredibly important and can be used to predict both enjoyment of the game and cultivate story-consistent attitudes. Future research should examine more closely the nature of PSRs between avatar and player, as this context is relatively unexplored.
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Identification and Parasocial Relationships With Video Game Characters
Arienne Ferchaud
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Narratives in Health and Risk Messaging
Julie E. Volkman
In health and risk communication, evidence is a message feature that can add credibility, realism, and legitimacy to health and risk messages. Evidence is usually defined into two types: statistical or narrative. Statistical evidence employs quantifications of events, places, phenomena, or other facts, while narrative evidence involves stories, anecdotes, cases, or testimonials. While many health and risk messages employ statistical or factual information, narrative evidence holds appeal for health and risk communication for its utility in helping individuals learn their risks and illnesses through stories and personal experiences. In particular, narratives employed as evidence in a health or risk message especially hold value for their ability to communicate experiences and share knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas about complex health issues, propose behavior change, and assist individuals coping with disease. As a result, the personal experiences shared, whether they are from first-hand knowledge, or recounting another’s experience, can focus attention, enhance comprehension for risks, and recall of health and risk information. Furthermore, readers engage with the story and develop their own emotional responses which may align with the purpose of the health and risk message. Narratives, or stories, can occur in many ways or through various points of view, but the stories that “ring true” to readers often have a sense of temporality, coherence, and fidelity. As a result, formative research and pre-testing of health and risk messages with narratives becomes important to understand individual perceptions related to the health issue and the characters (or points of view). Constructs of perceived similarity, interest, identification, transportation, and engagement are helpful to assess in order to maximize the usefulness and persuasiveness of narratives as evidence within a health and risk message. Additionally, understanding the emotional responses to narratives can also contribute to perceptions of imagery and vividness that can make the narrative appealing to readers. Examining what is a narrative as evidence in health and risk messages, how they are conceptualized and operationalized and used in health and risk messages is needed to understand their effectiveness.
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Queer/ing Archives
Morgan DiCesare and Charles E. Morris III
Communication scholars have taken up queer archives and their artifacts, often in a Western context, in relation to a range of presumptions that had previously structured (straight) archival engagement. Queer archives and memories have been buried and erased by homophobic histories. Nonetheless, revisitations of these histories seek to differentially unearth queer materials, challenge the terms of erasure, and revise modern conceptions of sexuality that tie it to identity, community, organization, and activism. Queer scholars and activists have rewritten archival standards that had previously functioned to exclude queer life, and they have challenged the terms of “queer” in relation to both past and present. Queer/ing archives thus addresses practices, places, objects, theories, people, and methods that have been articulated to queer pasts in the interest of its influences on queer presents and futures.
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Psychoanalytic Methods and Critical Cultural Studies
Atilla Hallsby
Within communication studies, critical and cultural scholars will likely encounter psychoanalytic methods by way of rhetoric scholarship, which has made plentiful and recurring use of Freudian and Lacanian concepts. A survey of psychoanalytic methods “before” and “after” the linguistic turn is offered—juxtaposing key concepts with rhetorical scholarship that employs psychoanalytic terms of art. Psychoanalytic theory is foundationally the study of the unconscious. Before the linguistic turn, the Freudian theory of the unconscious informed Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification developed in A Rhetoric of Motives and numerous Jungian analyses of cinematic texts. In the linguistic turn’s aftermath, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan contributed understandings of speech, identification, and rhetoric that transformed Freud’s original formulations and productively supplemented Burke’s. These contributions, captured in Lacan’s four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, registers of the unconscious, and The “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” illustrate a variety of ways that critical and cultural scholars have enlisted psychoanalysis to describe instances of public address, social movements, political and legal discourse, and cinema/film. The unique feature of Lacan’s approach is that the unconscious is structured like a language, which means that the unconscious is received as a speech act. Moreover, contrary to the view that the subject uses the signifier, Lacan maintains that the signifier exercises an organizing role over the subject and its desire. Conceived within the history, theory, and practice of rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory offers conceptually rich insights tethered to the concepts of the unconscious, the signifier, and the drive (among others) that are enabling to the aims of critical and cultural studies.
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Surveillance and Public Space
Rachel Hall
Current communications research takes up the political and ethical problems posed by new surveillance technologies in public space, ranging from biometric technologies adopted by state security apparatuses to self- and peer-monitoring applications for the consumer market. In addition to studies that examine new surveillance technologies, scholars are tracking intensive and extensive expansions of surveillance in the name of risk management. Much of the scholarship produced in the last 15 years looks at how the establishment and expansion of the Department of Homeland Security within the United States and its international counterparts have dramatically altered security, military, and legal practices and cultures. Within this context what were once science fiction dystopias have become funded research and development projects and institutionalized practices aimed at remote data collection and processing, including facial recognition technology and a variety of remote sensing devices. Private-public partnerships between companies like Google and Homeland Security fusion centers have made it possible to use GPS technology to network data that promises to help manage a variety of natural and man-made disasters.
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Media Entertainment and Emotions
Ed S. Tan
Entertainment is fun, and fun is an emotion. What fun is as an emotion, and how it depends on features of entertainment messages and on other emotions, needs to be understood if we want to explain the appeal of entertainment. Entertainment messages such as movies, stories, drama, games, and sports spectacles can move us in a great variety of ways. But characteristic for the use of all genres is a remarkable, intense focus on interacting with the entertainment message and the virtual world it stages. Gamers in action or listeners of radio drama tend to persist in using the message, apparently blind and deaf to any distraction. Persistence is emotion driven. Intrinsic pleasure in what is a playful activity drives this passionate persistence. Enjoyment, interest, or excitement and absorption are the emotions that make entertainees go for more fun in the ongoing use of an entertainment message. In the use of an entertainment message, these go-emotions complement emotional responses to what happens in the world staged by the message. Horror incites fear and disgust, while serious drama elicits sadness and bittersweet feelings. In our conception, go and complementary emotions are immediate effects of the use of entertainment content: I feel excitement and apprehension now, while I am watching this thriller.
Models of distal effects of media entertainment, such as ones on mood, behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and preferences require a proper understanding of immediate emotional responses to concrete messages. The effects of entertainment are only incidental; the emphasis is on immediate emotional experiences in the use of entertainment messages. Immediate emotional responses can be understood and predicted from an analysis of entertainment messages.
Entertainment comes in messages with a characteristic temporal structure. Entertainment emotions develop across the presentation time of the message. Their development can be captured and understood in models of a message’s emotion structure. The emotion structure of a message represents the dynamics of go and complementary emotions across consecutive events, such as story episodes or drama scenes, and within these.
Research into the uses and effects of media entertainment has a long tradition. Immediate emotional responses to mediated entertainment messages have been theorized and researched since the seminal work of Dolf Zillmann in the 1970s. The state of the art in research on the entertainment emotions needs to be discussed—starting with a general model of these, and elaborating it for selected entertainment genres.
