"Mediatized fan play: Moods, modes and dark play in networked communities," by Line Nybro Petersen

Line Nybro Petersen's Mediatized Fan Play is shaped around a simple and compelling premise: fans engage with fandom in a state of play, and as networked media has proliferated, fans' play practices have spread to broader culture. While Petersen identifies specific fan practices such as writing fan fiction and cosplaying as "play," her emphasis is not on fan production but instead the connective tissue of interfan communication—from negotiating conduct in accordance with the affordances of Facebook fan groups to quoting from a fan text in casual conversation. Petersen aims not only to reframe fan experience through the lens of play theory, using the case studies of SKAM and Hamilton fandoms, but also to track how fan play has developed into political culture, centering the 2016 and 2020 US elections and the rise of the QAnon role-play-cum-conspiracy theory. Petersen positions fans as "pioneer communities," or those who have already trod the paths of transmedia communication that political communities and conspiracy theorists now trek, and to whom we can look for insight into the networked world. Petersen argues we are in a mediatized age, in which everyday life and media are inseparable; within this, fandom is taken not as a discrete category but as a sensibility "that media users can tap into" (1). Thus, understanding fan play is vital to understanding mediatization as a whole.