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Hobbyist Game Making Between Self-Exploitation and Self-Emancipation This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Keogh, Brendan (2021) Hobbyist Game Making Between Self-Exploitation and Self-Emancipation. In Sotamaa, Oli & Švelch, Jan (Eds.) Game Production Studies. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 29-45. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/210227/ c O. Sotamaa and J. Švelch / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Am- sterdam 2021 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (elec- tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). License: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463725439_CH01 Amsterdam University Press Chapter Title: Hobbyist Game Making Between Self-Exploitation and Self-Emancipation Chapter Author(s): Brendan Keogh Book Title: Game Production Studies Book Editor(s): Olli Sotamaa, Jan Švelch Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2021) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1hp5hqw.4 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Amsterdam University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Game Production Studies This content downloaded from 77.111.247.197 on Tue, 11 May 2021 02:38:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labour This content downloaded from 77.111.247.197 on Tue, 11 May 2021 02:38:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 77.111.247.197 on Tue, 11 May 2021 02:38:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1. Hobbyist Game Making Between Self- Exploitation and Self-Emancipation Brendan Keogh Abstract Critics of both the game industry specifically and the cultural industries broadly have long drawn attention to how romantic ideals around creative and passionate work are exploited by cultural firms. Long hours, periods of contingent employment, and expectations of unpaid labour are all justified as the sacrifices that cultural workers make in order to ‘do what they love’. Drawing from interviews with 200 amateur game makers, a range of complex, and sometimes contradictory justifications of self-exploitation are identified. While some game makers speak of ambitions to one day get paid to make games, many others justify keeping their creative work separate from what they do for money as a form of self-emancipation. Keywords: creativity dispositif, amateur production, creative labour, hobbyist game making, unpaid labour, working conditions Labour issues within the video game industry are well-documented. Unpaid overtime, mandated and excessive periods of crunch, unpredictable studio closures and layoffs, and a culture of peer pressure and self-surveillance ensure a low retention and high turnover of staff to such an extent that the average game worker’s age sits perpetually at about 30 years old in industry surveys. Of particular interest to game industry researchers has been the cultivation of self-exploitation among these passionate young workers, who, for a time, willingly accept such conditions in order to follow their dream of one day being paid to make video games. Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford (2005) call this chewed-up-and-spat-out demographic the ‘passionate play-slaves’ of the video game industry, while Julian Kücklich’s (2005) notion of ‘playbour’ has traced how a lack of distinction between the acts of (and enthusiasm for) playing and making video games works in Sotamaa, O. and J. Švelch (eds.), Game Production Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. doi 10.5117/9789463725439_ch01 This content downloaded from 77.111.247.197 on Tue, 11 May 2021 02:38:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 BRENDAN KEogH favour of employers, who easily monetize the unpaid activity of modders, players, and user-generated content creators. In the video game industry, as in an increasing number of economic sectors under neoliberal capitalism, a clear distinction between work and leisure has crumbled away as people take on precarious, project-based, underpaid (or unpaid), yet seemingly fulfilling work for the opportunity to follow their dreams. While such critiques are vital for understanding the conditions of work – both cultural and otherwise – in the twenty-first century, they also risk reducing the myriad of reasons for which people undertake cultural activity to purely economic ones. Without a doubt, many aspirational video game makers willingly work for either below minimum wage or no wage at all in the hope that ‘one day’ it will pay off. But in interviews I have conducted, numerous unpaid independent game makers articulated an explicit lack of desire to one day be paid for their video games. Here is one example: [My game making is] mostly a hobby. Before, I was unemployed; profes- sionally, I was a software developer and I have a degree in computer science, so if I really wanted to I could try to make games professionally […], but I don’t really connect with that side of it, so it’s very much a hobby. I’m fortunate now to have the time to be not working and doing more creative stuff, so I’ve been making a fair few games lately but, generally speaking, just every now and then. […] I didn’t really want to go all in on an industry that might get mad at me. So being able to churn out a Bitsy [small game-making tool] game and be like ‘well that’s over now, I could leave forever if I wanted to’, rather than spending years on something big, was really helpful – Hobbyist (non-binary, 25). Game makers1 who expressed such sentiments were, in their own minds at least, keeping their creative practice separate from their job as a way to avoid the exploitations of the video game industry. This is the type of game maker that Anna Anthropy might call the ‘videogame zinester’ (2012) or that Chris J. Young has termed the ‘everyday game maker ’ (Young 2018): non-professional video game creators in domestic, amateur, or otherwise 1 Throughout this chapter, I use the general terms ‘video game maker’ and ‘game maker’ interchangeably in lieu of the more narrowly defined and more technologically connotative ‘video game developer’ or the more professionally connotative ‘gameworker,’ which has recently been popularized by the game industry unionization movement Game Workers Unite. Many game makers I spoke to did not feel game developer accounted for their work, and so I have followed Young (2018, 7) in using game maker as the broader category that encompasses both professional and non-commercial aspects of video game creation. This content downloaded from 77.111.247.197 on Tue, 11 May 2021 02:38:25 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms HobbYIST GAME MAKING BETWEEN SELF-EXPLOITATION AND SELF-EMANCIPATION 31 ‘informal’ (Lobato and Thomas 2015) contexts beyond the confines of (but still in relation to) what would typically be understood as ‘the video game industry’. These are the video game makers for whom their activity is, for want of a better word, a hobby. In order to understand the field of video game production and not just the industry, it is crucial to explore the conduits of formality and informality that run between the professionalized space of the video game industry, and the much broader space of hobbyist, amateur, and homebrew activity, which predates and acts as the foundation for video game industrialization (Keogh 2019b). In this chapter, I want to consider how game production studies can account for the wider range of reasons one may choose to make and distribute video games other than for actual or hopeful financial gain, while not falling into the trap of glorifying unpaid creative labour in ways that perpetuate the exploitative strategies of the industry. Rather than simply distinguishing between professional and hobbyist means of game making, I will connect a history of hobbies, theories of cultural work, and a reconsideration of how the video game industry is constituted to better articulate the relationships between these different modes and identities of game making within the increasingly self-governed space of what scholars such as Angela McRobbie (2002) call ‘soft capitalism’. The chapter draws from the empirical research I conducted throughout 2018 and 2019 for a larger project with a wide range of formal and informal game makers in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany. Across 200 semi-structured interviews, I asked game makers from different back- grounds about why and how they make video games. I was struck by how many self-identifying hobbyists explicitly articulated their work not as a pathway into the game industry, but as a way to avoid what they perceived, much like the scholars cited above, as the exploitative aspects of professional game development.
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