Pedagogical Implications

Audience and Identity

As Kevin Roozen (2009) elaborated in “‘Fan Fic-ing’ English Studies”: “how we understand and imagine the networks in which literate persons, tools, and practices circulate is a crucial pedagogical issue” (p. 164). Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum, yet student writers frequently feel as if they are writing for their instructors alone. In order to better prepare students for the composing processes that lay beyond the classroom—digital processes that are increasingly public in nature— composition instructors need to offer their students opportunities to explore the nuances of audience and the experience of writing for others. This can be easily achieved by allowing students to write gaming fan-fiction.

Just like writers in any fan-fiction community, writers of gaming fan-fiction must be acutely aware of their audiences as their stories circulate to other fans of the game. Fan-fiction writers can make assumptions about their readers, enabling them to understand the importance of a knowledgeable audience. On the Fanfiction.net site, Ergoemos explained the benefits of writing for this kind of community:

There is an established audience for the universe in question. Writing pure fiction means you must convince others to be interested in your topic. That can be very hard. With a large collection of people already interested in the topic, there is less need to search for an audience who might be interested. (2011)

An established audience not only allows writers to find people with similar goals and interests, but also provides writers with the challenge of appealing to that specific audience. In a composition classroom where students rely on gaming experience to drive their fiction, these appeals can be made easier because students will be tapping into similar experiences and building upon a shared literacy.

This networked community of writers and readers also affords student writers with the chance to examine how the tools and practices of writing in an online community affect their writing style. As their writing becomes a shared narrative (re)viewed by others in the community, student writers will need to make conscious choices about whose advice to follow and whose advice to ignore during the revision process. Writing, in this sense, will not only depend upon collaboration between writers and audience members—who take up the role of critical readers—but will also require writers to keep their audience members in mind as they determine to which particular audience member(s) they want to most appeal. Because audience members (i.e., critical readers) are so involved in the fan-fiction writing process, their presence becomes an essential tool that impacts the narrative.

In her dissertation on fan-fiction, Juli Parrish (2007) explored how fan-fiction communities are like writing groups, further exposing how the meaning-making process is shared between writer and reader. Citing Anne Ruggles Gere, Parrish noted how fan-fiction writing helps:

“reduce the distance between writer and reader” both physically, by bringing readers and writers into proximity and conversation, and conceptually, by helping people to learn that “knowledge is something they can help create rather than something to be received whole from someone else.” (p. 119)

Seen through this constructivist lens, gaming fan-fiction writing, therefore, empowers writers (and readers) to partake in the shared creation of knowledge. And as this knowledge creation happens, the distinct lines between readers and writers blur, creating an authorial identity that is dependent upon audience influence.

These identities are further developed through the online forum of a fan-fiction community, which can be seen through some of the profile pages on Fanfiction.net.

Avatars of writers mentioned throughout this webtext: Ergoemos, Discar, and Ava Nova respectively.

Profiles—aimed at the audiences of fan-fiction writers—contain information like short autobiographical information, others stories the writers have written, and a forum avatar. As creators of gaming fan-fiction, students will be able to use their gaming experiences and fanaticism to help construct an online persona. Since this persona may not coincide with their professional goals, students should be afforded the opportunity to remain anonymous (as many writers at Fanfiction.net are).

Requiring students to join an online community like Fanfiction.net does run the risk of altering a student’s online persona. However, instead of seeing this identity creation as a threat or inconvenience to students’ digital lives, navigating this public persona in a structured setting can instead spark critical discussion about the nature of digital representation. As Soomin Jwa (2012) noted “more and more scholars raise concerns about integrating online discourse. . . into the writing classroom, in hopes of stimulating discussion about the emerging notion of digital rhetoric and digital identity” (p. 337). Through facilitated discussions, students would be able to critically analyze how their online identity would be different (or stay the same) if people were to know of their fanaticism. This kind of discussion would easily translate into a discussion of digital rhetoric and identity as students analyze how their online writing represents who they are or want to be.