Re: playing videogames for work vs. play: he loved it. He'd have done it fulltime if he could have. It wasn't just play - he had to get the game quickly to certain points, enable this hardware and compare the game play with the hardware enabled vs. disabled, keep a lab notebook (via email) stuff like that. But the skills that some kids develop, especially in real time strategy games *do* I think carry over into real life.
Re: the original story not being as interesting as the fanfic. I can relate to that. It's one reason I love slashy stories (either subtext or explicit.) When well-done they add a whole new dimension to the story.
I don't think fanfiction can be separated entirely from the market forces which create it. People loved the Oz books so much that Baum wrote twenty or so more books. After he died, Ruth Plumly Thompson published a few, and then several modern authors have also written Oz-universe books. I am not sure that had Oz been published today, there would have been that many sequels. Perhaps then we would have seen tons of Oz fanfiction. As it was, the market at that time was more than willing to satisfy the "consumers'" desire for more trips into the Oz-verse.
Today, readers supply their own universe extensions. I was surprised how many POTO published stories there were in the '90s. Obviously readers wanted more.
IMO it's based on the premise that readers and viewers know what they want, and don't need, or want to be told otherwise. When the popular series Beauty and the Beast jumped the shark (because the main actress left the show), the producers took it in a direction most fans hated - which produced an explosion of fanzines and mimeographed continuations of the story - as if the TV series had never changed.
Re: Susan Kay. I don't like calling it "published fanfiction" either, because that term is a gratuitous insult. It implies that fanfiction writing is automatically crap, for one thing, and that's not true.
Personally I didn't like the book, but I give her credit for writing a story so sticky that it's impossible to wipe it off if you write POTO ffics, no matter how hard you try. Similar with Suzy Charnas - that woman thought of *everything.*
no subject
Re: the original story not being as interesting as the fanfic. I can relate to that. It's one reason I love slashy stories (either subtext or explicit.) When well-done they add a whole new dimension to the story.
I don't think fanfiction can be separated entirely from the market forces which create it. People loved the Oz books so much that Baum wrote twenty or so more books. After he died, Ruth Plumly Thompson published a few, and then several modern authors have also written Oz-universe books. I am not sure that had Oz been published today, there would have been that many sequels. Perhaps then we would have seen tons of Oz fanfiction. As it was, the market at that time was more than willing to satisfy the "consumers'" desire for more trips into the Oz-verse.
Today, readers supply their own universe extensions. I was surprised how many POTO published stories there were in the '90s. Obviously readers wanted more.
IMO it's based on the premise that readers and viewers know what they want, and don't need, or want to be told otherwise. When the popular series Beauty and the Beast jumped the shark (because the main actress left the show), the producers took it in a direction most fans hated - which produced an explosion of fanzines and mimeographed continuations of the story - as if the TV series had never changed.
Re: Susan Kay. I don't like calling it "published fanfiction" either, because that term is a gratuitous insult. It implies that fanfiction writing is automatically crap, for one thing, and that's not true.
Personally I didn't like the book, but I give her credit for writing a story so sticky that it's impossible to wipe it off if you write POTO ffics, no matter how hard you try. Similar with Suzy Charnas - that woman thought of *everything.*