Elyse Graham, The republic of games: Textual culture between old books and new media. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2018, paperback, $24.95 (176p), ISBN 9780773553392.
[1] At a time when participation in social media is integrated into so many aspects of our lives, Elyse Graham seeks to theorize the place that social media occupies in relation to wider digital and literary culture. The Republic of Games argues for the benefits of approaching social media use in terms of gamification theory to explain why participants are willing to perform so much free labor on the internet. Graham asserts that the gamification of digital culture—specifically social media and fan fiction sites—marks a departure from a nongamified print culture. In doing so, Graham refutes the established understanding of fan fiction as a gift economy.
[2] Graham's book comprises thematic essays with recurrent topics such as digital textual production, the role of games in the circulation of digital texts, and the theorization of the digital turn in literary studies. In the introduction, Graham positions her work in relation to the concept of the gift economy as described by Richard Barbrook (1998) and Karen Hellekson (2009), who applied it to tech culture and fandom, respectively. In Hellekson's influential description of fandom as a gift economy, communities are forged around the exchange of symbolic gifts divorced from commercial value; Graham intervenes to replace gifting with a game economy in which winning is the goal. The first chapter argues for games as a framework that has been largely unexplored in attempts to describe and judge the contribution of social media sites to the digital circulation of texts and capital. Chapter 2 uses Facebook as an example, presenting it as typical of "the structural transformation of social-media platforms to incorporate game systems" (33) whereby points in the form of likes and shares allow for the identification of winners and losers and encourage constant interaction by users. The third chapter makes the case that fan fiction sites also operate under game logic, the effects of which are made visible in their textual production. The fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (AO3) is presented as a typical fan site that similarly uses a point-based system encouraging hierarchization and the production of more content. The final chapter takes a broader view and challenges the ways scholars have positioned the internet as a technological revolution comparable to the invention of the printing press. A brief epilogue reiterates the argument of the book: that digital textual production is influenced by social media, that the internet is governed by game mechanics, and that textual production is gamified.
[3] Looking at digital textual production through the lens of games allows Graham to connect various areas of enquiry that are often treated separately: the role of social media in community and identity formation; the relationship between social media communication and other forms of writing; the place of fan fiction in the digital literary sphere; and the technological, cultural, and commercial infrastructures that underpin all of these. This book, with its ambitious project of putting ideas from fan studies, platform studies, book history, and literary studies into conversation with each other, allows for a reconsideration of the relationships among these elements.
[4] The inclusion of fan fiction in such a study forges connections between an often neglected form of literature and the material and cultural conditions of its production while also emphasizing the inextricability of digital text across the different spaces of the internet. Social media sites, fan fiction sites, and other means of sharing texts are not limited to single functions; instead, users move across multiple sites, using them in different ways at different times. Graham's choice of elements to include in her study of twenty-first-century digital textuality attempts to account for this interconnectedness.
[5] However, the nature of the book, while allowing Graham to bring disparate fields of study into conversation with each other, sometimes results in obfuscation of their differences. For example, Graham's efforts to position Facebook and AO3 as examples of social media sites leads to a distortion of AO3's characteristics. Unlike Facebook, AO3 is a nonprofit site with no advertisements, it was not designed with user retention in mind, and it does not promote content via a self-serving algorithm but asks users to set their own search parameters. While the relationship between fan fiction sites and social media platforms is a fruitful topic of inquiry, and while the application of game logic to fan fiction is a novel way of understanding its characteristics, the argument presented in chapter 3 is undermined by generalizations about AO3 and Facebook.
[6] The idea of a gift economy is influential in fan studies, so the argument that game-play elements rather than gifting best describe the characteristics and circulation of fan fiction texts is a welcome addition to this ongoing critical conversation. The gift economy model can be criticized for its utopian view of fan production, which does not account for the capitalist structures that circumscribe fans' access to the technologies and leisure time that enable their participation in fan activities. Similarly, Graham defines games as "possess[ing] a sense of self-sustained separation from reality" (35). This idea that fan production cannot be separated from capitalist and other hierarchical structures applies equally to the concept of the gift economy and the game economy. Criticism of the gift economy as an animating force in fan production is thus a timely reminder that no cultural production is divorced from the conditions of late capitalism.
[7] Scholars working in literary criticism, platform studies, and game studies will find something in this book to expand their perspectives but may quibble with the depictions of their areas of expertise. Graham's text offers a timely challenge to the prevailing narrative of the gift economy in fan studies and to the place of fan fiction within larger considerations of digital culture. Rather than wholesale replacing the concept of gifting with gaming, the greatest strength of The Republic of Games lies in its ambitious attempt to attend to the connections between elements of digital culture that are often kept separate.