Kirwin, John (2024) An investigation into how distributed creative communities engage in the creative process through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Twitch Plays Pokémon’s narratives. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine Twitch Plays Pokémon as an example of an online community engaged in distributed creative practice and to explore their creative process and the ways in which they understood the narratives that emerged from their creativity. How online communities engage in the creative process, and how individuals interpret their community’s creative work are important to understand, as internet communities have become increasingly prominent in people’s lives and artistic development. Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) was a digital community that played the game Pokémon Red online in 2014, and during the sixteen days of play, they developed fiction and narratives to rationalise the events of their play in a distributed creative process. Through analysing these narratives and examining the development of particular elements over time, this thesis aims to further our understanding of the social processes of creativity and how individuals interact with a broader creative community when faced with conflicts. To reinforce the qualitative analysis provided in this thesis quantitative analysis of the corpus of comments from Twitch chat and Reddit highlight trends within the data. This thesis makes use of theories of distributed creativity (Sawyer and DeZutter, 2009), the role of conflict in creativity (Rank, 1989), the narreme1 (Hills, 2002) to form the creative engine model to explain the distributed creative process. Narremes are combined with the concept of hyperdiegetic narratives where much of the narrative is formed by the reader (Bronwen Thomas, 2011) to explain how individuals understand the creative work of their community. Through this analysis, this thesis identifies a simple creative process that shows how a narrative emerges as well as how individuals understand the broad and contradictory interpretations. The creative model may aid in studies of other distributed creative groups, and the narremes interaction with hyperdiegetic narratives provides a model for understanding how an individual forms a complete narrative from the creative work of a distributed creative community.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	investigation; distributed creative communities; engage; creative process; quantitative and qualitative analysis; Twitch Plays Pokémon’s narratives;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > Media Studies
Item ID:	19161
Depositing User:	IR eTheses
Date Deposited:	08 Nov 2024 12:52
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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