Fan-fiction as literacy

What Fan-fiction Offers to Gaming

“Active learning” (Gee, 2007, p. 24) also happens in the world of fan-fiction writing, allowing gamers to further enhance their problem-solving skills once they become part of the fan-fiction community.  That is, fan-fiction writers easily “experienc[e] the world in new ways” as they rewrite the stories they have been told and re-imagine the characters they love.  They also “[form] new affiliations” within their selected fandoms and “[prepare] for future learning” by sharing their expertise and learning from the skills of others.  While gamers create and manipulate their literacy within the worlds created by video games, they are somewhat limited in their abilities to purely innovate.  Gamers who write fan-fiction, however, can easily transfer their active learning skills into “critical learning” as they “learn how to innovate in the domain—how to produce meanings that, while recognizable to experts in the domain, are seen as somehow novel or unpredictable” (Gee, 2007, p.25).  The world of the game provides them with a backdrop for critically analyzing situations that may have been absent in the original narrative.  As authors of fan-fiction, gamers can make use of fan-fiction literate practices—like collaborative writing, blurred roles between teachers and learners, audience awareness, and digital proficiencies—and develop a new gaming literacy with a community of writers who offer feedback and critical analysis.

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