[1] 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.
[2] The book is divided into three parts: part 1 outlines Petersen's interdisciplinary field and the central concept of "play moods"; part 2 concerns modes of fan play; and part 3 concerns fan play in the political sphere. Petersen replicates fan typography, meme formats, ASCII art, and emojis for illustration, and uses tables to demonstrate taxonomies. This is Petersen's first book, expanding on her previous research across media studies and fan studies, markedly on fandom as a frame through which to attend mediatization and fan engagement’s relationship to religion. Her most recent publications, "Challenges in Research on the Mediatisation of Culture" (2023) and "New Territories for Fan Studies: The Insurrection, QAnon, Donald Trump and Fandom" (Petersen et al. 2023), expand on this book's mission.
[3] The introduction and part 1 provide an extensive theoretical grounding and literature review, introducing Petersen's interdisciplinary frame of fan studies, play theory, and media studies. Play theory emerged from the work of Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga and extended into domains of sociology, cultural theory, education studies, and psychology, all of which Petersen draws from. Petersen contends that fandom is autotelic; it is engaged with, not toward, a particular end but to sustain itself, like play. While she does not evidence this (perhaps uncontroversial) claim, she diverts the potential criticism that this claim erases fans' reparative and antagonistic engagements with fan objects by specifying that "not…all fans are playful or that all fan practices constitute play" (5); however, this sits incongruously with the repeated claim that fandom as a whole is driven by a state of play. Petersen posits that fandom is driven by various play moods, or distinct ways "in which the player relates to the surrounding world" (34), which are relational and maintained by groups. Petersen uses Skovbjerg's (2016) theorization of four play moods: devotion, intensity, tension, and euphoria. Play moods are manifested through play modes, or the guiding principles that allow play to occur. The modes are "play rules," or the boundaries in which play occurs, and "language play." As the book progresses, this literature review seems limited—while well grounded in play theory, both media studies and contemporary fan studies seem underaddressed. Much of Petersen's discussion of play as infectious and autotelic, eventually leading to the creation of conspiracy theories, would be enriched by accounts of networked and affective contagion and collective narrativization, such as networked publics (e.g., boyd 2011), affective publics (Papacharissi 2015), ambient affiliation (Zappavigna 2011), and emergent storytelling (Dawson and Mäkelä 2020). Petersen's account of fan studies centers Henry Jenkins's work, across convergence, participation, textual poaching, and fans' civic participation, and Cornell Sandvoss's work on fan affect and play, and while much of this analysis is rich, there is limited reflection on recent fan studies work, which becomes progressively more problematic as the book continues.
[4] Part 2 attends to transmedia fandoms and the two play modes. Part 2 is centred on creating taxonomies for the two play modes that account for networked social media. In chapter 3, Petersen discusses SKAM (Shame), a Norwegian television show innovative in its use of transmediality, and how play rules shape its fans' experiences, framed around focus group interviews with SKAM fans. Petersen argues there are three levels of play rules: the infrastructural (akin to affordances), authoritative, and conventional. Taking from play theory, Petersen argues fandom takes place in "magic circle[s]" (via Huizinga 2016, 55) that delineate the boundaries and limits of play. Fans must draw their circle and thus create and maintain play moods within the layered rules of networked media and fan community, simultaneously managing the risk of context collapse that comes from media's omnipresence.
[5] Chapter 4 focuses on language play in the Hamilton fandom. Hamilton is a stage musical about US founding father Alexander Hamilton, which Petersen posits developed a fandom through its transmedial promotion. Petersen analyzes Hamilton fans' playful language practices on Twitter and, expanding on the work of linguist Guy Cook, argues that there are three primary forms of language play. "Formal" language play concerns "play with sounds and letter shapes, rhymes and rhythms, grammatical structures and patterns" (74). Petersen expands Cook's taxonomy to include typography, fragmentation, and playful use of hyperlinks. "Semantic" language play concerns "units of meaning, world-building, puns and riddles" (74), to which Petersen adds the repetition and recontextualization of quotes, hashtag games, writing prompts, and character role-play. Petersen introduces the new category of "animated" language play, which "is tied to the digital affordances of networked media" (84), and includes the use of emojis, GIFs, ASCII art, and asterisked action (e.g., "*falls down*, *shivers*, or *flips table*" [87]). This discussion of animated language play and its relationship with fans' embodiment and affect is a highlight of the book.
[6] Part 3 turns beyond fandom to fan play in political culture. Petersen argues fan play is now of "primary significance" to political communication, which is going through a process of fanization, largely due to "the intoxicating use of popular culture and fan practices" (96–97). She expands her theorization of play to account for it not as a positive force of acculturation, humanization, and catharsis, or a negative one, encouraging disorder and facilitating domination and power play, but an ambivalent one that can empower all sides of politics.
[7] In chapter 5, Petersen outlines the multifarious overlaps of politics and fan play—from political merchandise to politicians using popular media references; fan art of politicians; the growth of fan activism; and the use of popular culture as political commentary, such as The Hunger Games and The Handmaid's Tale being referred to in real-world protests. While this is an interesting discussion of intersections between political engagement and fandom, at times the argument of "fanization" seems thin and lacks a critical drive—if for no other reason than its vast scope, supposedly encompassing students' satirical protests against Richard Nixon in 1973 through to the celebrification of political figures in the 2010s; mockery of politicians through role-play accounts on Twitter; citizens' growing sense of need for personal connection with politicians; and most pop culture references in the public sphere. Indeed, much of Petersen's argument surrounding the fanization of politics seems to speak more to the rise of populism than resonances with fandom. Some of the parallels she draws seem shallow, for example the use of merchandise and slogans in political campaigning; there is no discussion of the history of political campaigns or political merchandise given nor of fans influencing the growth of pop culture in political merchandise—the practices are simply framed as similar to fandom. Some reflection on the literature of politics in the public sphere would strengthen this argument—not to mention the preexisting scholarship on the overlap of fandom and political action, markedly the "Reactionary Fandom" special issue of Television and New Media (ed. Stanfill 2020) and the "Fandom and Politics" issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (eds. Hinck and Davisson 2020).
[8] The final chapter provides an excellent account of trolling, the imageboard culture and history of 4Chan and 8Chan, and the rise and spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory alongside the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. Petersen uses the theories of "dark play" and "deep play" to elucidate the playful, if not entirely fannish, modes through which users interact with illegal, immoral, and politically charged content. Dark play is that in which "the intentions of the players and the play itself is kept in the dark from its surroundings" (111). Deep play is that in which players are in "too deep" (111), entailing risk—whether fiscal, physical, social, or emotional. QAnon entails both dark and deep play, the anonymity and subterfuge of dark play amplifying the risks of deep play.
[9] Petersen demonstrates that, like a fan community, 4Chan—and then 8Chan—has standard play rules, its own magic circle with a sense of internal solidarity and identity ("incels" against "normies") and playful language practices; it also has a fannish relationship with media objects, especially Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which provides QAnon's central narrative of blood-drinking cabals of politicians. Petersen's study of user comments on 4Chan implies that most people interacting with QAnon were playing; they were collaboratively writing and role-playing the "open-ended narrative" of Q (121). QAnon then spread beyond 4Chan, a playground inadequately sequestered from the rest of the networked world; those outside of the magic circle of 4Chan did not understand the fictitious, playful nature of the theory, and Petersen argues that its growth to global significance and tragedy has obscured its origins as a text "mostly meant to entertain a small group of 4chan insiders" (130). Petersen argues that attention to play and to fandom is required to understand QAnon's full history and power.
[10] Mediatized Fan Play makes its status as a third-wave fan studies text clear; its primary concern is not fandom itself but the light that fan studies sheds on the broader world. Petersen contributes to a building corpus on fans as pioneers and fandom's capacity to transform the culture around it, akin to Judith Fathallah's Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture (2020) and Abigail De Kosnik's Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (2016) and more specifically works reframing politics in light of fandom (e.g., Miro 2021; Dean and Andrews 2021; Allen and Moon 2023). With that said, Petersen's claims around the fan studies discipline are puzzling. She argues fan play's "manifestation in political processes and the public sphere…illustrates why studying and theorizing fandom matters most lucidly" (94), as if this topic has not been explored by others; she stresses we must not "overstate the value of fan communities or fan practices" (97) but concludes by arguing "we can no longer settle for thinking of fandom as belonging to non-serious cultural pursuits" (131). This line of thought seems misplaced—I can think of no recent fan studies work claiming fandom is nonserious or requires justification. This is disheartening, especially as some of Petersen's most interesting discussions are around the intricacies of fan communication. The book as a whole does not assess fandom critically; fan studies is reframed through play theory and then used as a tool through which to study conspiracy theories. Petersen's view of fans as cultural agenda-setters also seems limited; there is no discussion of the way fans or fan labor can be manipulated and exploited, as addressed by Booth (2015) and Kohnen (2017), among others.
[11] The book's split interests—everyday fan practices and conspiracy theories—lead to some dissonance between chapters, and at times, part 3 seems more concerned with play broadly than fan play specifically. Parts 1 and 2 seem at times to be elaborate preamble to part 3, not only due to extensive foreshadowing but because part 3 is far denser and tighter in argument, moving beyond taxonomies of fan play to the way QAnon has been detached from its playful origins. Petersen's detailed taxonomies are not put to use in part 3—indeed, Petersen rarely uses these specific terms beyond their definition. Jumping from discussion of Hamilton fandom to the 2016 US presidential election holds the common thread of US politics but lacks an attentive account of dark and deep play in fandom itself, which would add much to the account of QAnon as a fannish phenomenon; the discussion of conspiracy theories around celebrities secretly being queer or faking having children is fascinating, but it is brief. Through Petersen's discussion of dark and deep play, I was struck by how much these concepts would illuminate the great scandals of media fandom—from My Immortal through to the JohnLock conspiracy.
[12] Issues of definition hinder the text's rigor. Petersen incorrectly defines shitposting, real person fiction, false/hidden identities (including all pseudonymity/anonymity in fan spaces), Mary Sue characters, self-insert fan fiction, and LARPing, providing no citation or context for her definitions. The misdefinition of LARPing as "playing the role of a made-up character" (113) broadly is especially problematic, as Petersen goes on to refer to most/all fans' and QAnon participants' online lives as LARPing, when LARPing specifically refers to live action role-play—that which involves embodying the character. Petersen further implies LARPers deceive those around them; considering LARPing is explicitly costumed and performed, this is particularly confusing.
[13] While Petersen discusses translation as part of language play, she does not address the power dynamics of fan play being so dominated by the Anglophone. Similarly, she discusses the authority of moderators in fan groups but does not discuss race, gender, or class—and thus access to technology—as influencing authority. Petersen acknowledges her focus is on the United States and Scandinavia, but this limited scope destabilizes the absolute nature of some of her claims. Her discussion of the 2019 Christchurch shootings is similarly limited; framing the event as broadly right wing and not specifically Islamophobic and racist seems to conflate the shootings at two mosques (locations Petersen does not note) by an Australian in New Zealand with US politics.
[14] Despite issues of scope and structure, Petersen has, to my mind, achieved two great things in Mediatized Fan Play: opened up play theory as a productive new domain in fan studies and expanded our understanding of conspiracy theories as playful, transmedial, and networked phenomena that demand fan studies–informed research. As a work of fan studies, Mediatized Fan Play excels as an account of the way fans communicate in fleeting, perpetual ways, driven by a desire for fun; this is a novel approach to fan studies that centers fan experience, the threads that hold fan collectivities together, and the units of play that facilitate fan production. This approach will be of use for myriad scholars attending to fan cultures, fan affect, and the spread of fan play throughout networked media.