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Contemporary Media

Contemporary Media

The Contemporary Media Team is a group of student researchers dedicated to exploring interactions with contemporary entertainment that are often overlooked in the realm of academia. They work to investigate counter-hegemonic topics in an attempt to introduce underexplored dynamics to academia and normalize the discussion of non-normalized contemporary media interactions.

Team Members

Team Lead, Enstars

Trisha Nguyen

Team Lead, Enstars

Alyce Wu

Team Lead, Game Industry

Gwendolyn Patwardhan

Team Lead, Game Industry

John Redinbo

Team Lead, Sludge

Kristy Chereath

Team Lead, Sludge

Riana Santos

Em Dang

Vrushabh Deogirikar

Darren Inouye

Shreya Jain

Megu Kanzawa

Shanice Liu

Kate Parent

Avi Patni

Jason Serrano

Grant Swanson

Jonathan Wu

Game Industry Team

The Game Industry subteam investigates the challenges faced by developers in a post-pandemic industry defined by mass layoffs and job insecurity. Beyond pandemic-related impacts, the team explores issues like employment instability, inadequate industry preparation, and limited information sharing. By conducting anonymous interviews, the team uncovers how developers navigate poor working conditions and build careers despite precarity, offering insights to inform game studies and address systemic concerns within a rapidly evolving field.

Enstars Team

Fan translation efforts like fansubbing and scanlations have been key to making media accessible globally. Ensemble Stars (Enstars), a Japanese mobile game without an official English release for over five years, gained a strong English-speaking fanbase thanks to extensive fan-created resources centralized on the English Enstars wiki. This Enstars subteam examines how these resources influenced the game’s global reach, especially after a 2021 copyright strike removed fan translations from the wiki, followed by the game’s official English release in 2022.

Sludge Team

The Sludge subteam explores the impact of multimodal short-form videos (M-SFVs), a TikTok trend featuring dual-clip formats that embed multitasking within a single platform, unlike traditional picture-in-picture setups. By examining how this overstimulating format affects attention and information retention, the team identifies user preferences for traditional TikTok videos, suggesting an aversion to the hyper-stimulating M-SFV design and broader implications for understanding attention dynamics in social media.

People connect with media and characters in a variety of ways with nuanced and unique ways of expressing their attachments. In the fandom space, notable terms such as “shipping,” “simping,” “self-shipping,” and “kinning” are used by fans to identify certain feelings they hold towards characters, but these distinct attachments have yet to be considered through the lens of parasocial relationships. The current work explores these emerging patterns of parasocial relationships with fictional characters within contemporary fandom communities and the attributes that lead to the development of those relationships.

Shippers and Kinnies: Re-conceptualizing Parasocial Relationships with Fictional Characters in Contemporary Fandom

As online gaming becomes an increasingly popular form of media, the growth and complexity of gaming specific toxic behaviors merits evaluation. Toxicity of gaming communities can even manifest outside of the game itself, such as orbitally through online social media communities. The current work focuses on examining the orbital toxicity of a specific series of events within the young Genshin Impact community in an attempt to evaluate the relationship between a toxic game’s reputation and the behaviors of its players.

Within the past year, short-form video platforms such as TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels have seen the rise of “Sludge Videos,” or vertical videos that pair user clips driven by narrative with unrelated visually stimulating footage. In doing so, it engages viewers while manipulating their attention across multiple loads of information. The current work aims to explore how sludge videos seemingly both divide and retain our attention.