Paper long abstract:

Within the transnational technoludic online communities of practice—among which I am doing persistent thick participation since 2002—informal mutual tutelage and training is a core practice. In the case of 'game modding' this may well amount to 'postindustrial unwaged labour.' But there is another, less negative interpretation. First, the online-communal practices enable the members to live their personal conglomerations of ambiences, sentiments, aesthetics, and narrative content, built from a lifetime of digesting popular culture, and of assimilating its modes of representation into their own conceptions of life. Second, since I presented 'my online tribe' at the 2006 workshop of the media anthropology network, more than half of the core-group has crossed the blurry border to professionalism and works in exactly the jobs they envisioned during the early times of the community. By expanding Henry Jenkins's notion of co-creative media I will collapse this twofoldness of rewards, mythopoeic and economic, into one.