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Researching Game-making Skills, cultures, and politics
Workshop program
Digital Media Research Centre Queensland University of Technology
7 - 12 December, 2020
QUT acknowledges the Turrbal and Yugara as the First Nations owners of the lands where QUT now stands. We pay respect to their Elders, lores, customs and creation spirits. We recognise that these lands have always been places of teaching, research and learning.
QUT has prepared a virtual Welcome To Country, which I strongly encourage you to watch here.
This workshop is funded by, and is the capstone event for, the Australian Research Council DECRA project, “Formal, Informal, Embedded: Australian Game Developers and Skill Transfer” (DE180100973).
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Welcome, from the Digital Media Research Centre and its Transforming Media Industries research program, to Researching Game-making: Skills, Cultures, and Politics.
This event embodies the animating interests of the DMRC in many ways, not least of which its innovative experimentation with digital technology to create a meaningful experience among a shared community of games researchers, designers, and players. Games research is a central node of the Transforming Media Industries research program, which focuses on how the industrial practices and cultural dynamics of media industries are adapting to profound transformations in the production, distribution, consumption, and regulation of media content in local and global contexts. We embrace the spirit of investigation central to researching the practices, politics, and dynamics of game-making, the operation of power involved, and the potential for innovation that affect game-makers and the communities of play they support.
- Professor Amanda Lotz, Program Leader, “Transforming Media Industries”.
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Quick reference links
NOTE: As speakers will be presenting works-in-progress, please do not share these links beyond the workshop participants.
Workshop zone: https://researching-gamemaking.glitch.me
Discord channel: ● Invite link (use first time) (This invite should work 100 times. Email Brendan if it stops working) ● Access link (use after you’ve already joined once):
Youtube playlist of all public talks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8EvBPKtPNjNPW4CbM9Bvlvo0uBiw5jot
Zoom chat room: [CLOSED]
Scheduled optional Zoom chat times (in AEST (not AEDT)): Tuesday 8th, 8pm AEST (most convenient for UK and Turkey) Wednesday 9th, 8am AEST (most convenient for Australia, US, Canada) Thursday 10th, 2pm AEST (most convenient for Australia, Tokyo, Turkey) Friday 11th, 2am AEST (most convenient for US, Canada, UK)
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Concept note
This workshop seeks to bring together key researchers in the emerging subfield of game production studies to facilitate new conversations and collaborations that consider the processes, conditions, and identities through which videogames are produced.
The last decade has seen the global videogame industry undergo seismic changes in terms of how videogames are produced and distributed. The rise of independent game development (Ruffino 2018); extensive platformisation (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Nicoll and Keogh 2019); newly accessible and transformative development tools (Harvey 2014); heightened focus on labour conditions and discrimination in development studios (Cote and Harris 2020; Bulut 2020); and other drastic changes have greatly restructured videogame development in specific local contexts. Today, videogames are just as likely to be developed in small and informal settings with shoestring budgets as they are in established large campus-sized studios run by multinational corporations (Kerr 2017; Keogh 2019).
The changing nature of videogame production reflects broader shifts towards individualisation and informalisation in the creative or cultural industries (Banks 2007; McRobbie 2016), and raises challenging questions in terms of how we investigate and conceptualise key concepts in game production studies such as labour, platformisation, craft, inclusion, precarisation, creativity, community, and education.
Game production researchers have begun to fruitfully explore these conditions through a range of approaches including political economy, ethnography, labour studies, platform governance, history, and cultural industries. A constant refrain across this burgeoning body of research is a recognition of the need for new concepts and theories on the skills, cultures, and politics of making videogames in specific local and trans-local contexts (Izushi and Aoyama 2006; Joseph 2013; Jørgensen et al 2017; Kerr 2017; Parker and Jenson 2017).
To this end, this workshop asks participants to consider the following prompts:
● What are the conditions, ambitions, cultures, educational skills, and/or infrastructures that mediate the processes of making videogames creatively, economically, culturally, and/or socially?
● How are the various formal and informal scales of videogame production interrelated in specific local contexts?
● How can the cultural, social, and economic values of videogame production be more adequately accounted for and theorised?
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Workshop structure
This is an asynchronous workshop. Over the course of the week, participants are requested to spend approximately 1-2 hours a day on average engaging with the content.
The content is spread across four main components: 1. Watching pre-recorded presentations 2. Participating in written discussion on a Discord server 3. Chatting in informal Zoom catch-ups 4. Hanging out in the virtual workshop zone
Pre-recorded panels Speaker presentations will be pre-recorded and have been organised into thematic panels of 3 presentations each. They will be available to watch on Youtube, via the links in the Schedule below, or they can be watched in the workshop zone.
Videos can be watched at any time, in any order. However, a recommended viewing schedule has been provided to try to ensure all panels get equal engagement and discussion.
Follow along with the recommended schedule if your commitments allow, or watch the videos at whatever time, in whatever order, works best for you.
Discord server
The Discord server is the main site where discussions and collaboration will unfold over the course of the week. Each presentation panel will have its own channel, and participants are encouraged to use this channel to ask questions, write comments, and develop discussions relevant to the panel’s papers in this channel.
Because these are text channels, this means a participant who watches a video later in the week can catch up on and contribute to a discussion that has potentially been unfolding since the start of the week.
Presenters are encouraged to keep an eye on their own panel’s channel throughout the week.
There is also a general discussion channel, where a prompt will be posted every day in the hope of developing further conversations.
There is also an introductions channel, and an off-topic channel.
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Ideally, the Discord server will continue in some form after the end of the workshop to be a space for discussions around gamemaking research to continue to unfold.
Informal Zoom Catch-ups
Three/Four times throughout the week, a Zoom room will be available for informal real-time discussions between participants. This will be a strictly informal and optional catch-up to provide an opportunity for (virtual) face-to-face chats.
Scheduled times (in AEST (not AEDT)): Tuesday 8th, 8pm AEST (most convenient for UK and Turkey) Wednesday 9th, 8am AEST (most convenient for Australia, US, Canada) Thursday 10th, 2pm AEST (most convenient for Australia, Tokyo, Turkey) Friday 11th, 2am AEST (most convenient for US, Canada, UK)
Workshop zone
The workshop zone [LINK] is a real-time virtual space designed by Australian gamemakers Cecile Richard and Jae Stuart, using a software framework first developed by Paolo Pedicini for his gallery LIKE LIKE.
In this space, you can watch the sessions in virtual classrooms, follow links directly to the relevant Discord channels, hang out with other workshop participants in real-time, and explore an exhibition drawing from the Formal, Informal, Embedded project with Australian game developers.
The workshop zone can be run in most web browsers. Choose an avatar and a name (same name as you use throughout the workshop is preferred), and go hang out!
Each session can be viewed in the Zone at any time. Consider organising a time on the Discord server with other people to go watch a session together!
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Schedule
NOTE: Sessions can be viewed at any time, on any day, in any order. Listed days are simply a recommended viewing order to steer the week’s discussion.
Monday Zone room Direct link Discord link
Workshop welcome 1 Link -
Formal, informal, embedded: The field of videogame production in 1 Link Australia
Brendan Keogh
Session 1: Platformisation 2 -
Battle Pass Capitalism Link Daniel Joseph
Ambivalent Platformization: Livestreaming and Indie Game Link Development Felan Parker & Matthew Perks
Game-making and platformisation: Lessons learned? N/A David Nieborg
Game-maker talk 1 10 Link -
Unpacking: An accidentally commercial game Wren Brier
Wren Brier is a games artist and designer specialising in pixel art and UX/UI design. Over the course of her career Wren has worked at companies such as Halfbrick, Playside, and Well Placed Cactus, later working as a freelance artist before joining Witch Beam Games. Her upcoming title, Unpacking, was picked for the Stugan games accelerator program and has since been included in showcases around the world and nominated for 3 BitSummit awards.
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Tuesday
Session 2: Data and automation 3 -
Agency and Automation in Digital Game Production N/A Aleena Chia
Videogames and the data analytic imaginary Link Ben Egliston
On Data-Driven Game Development: New Proficiencies, New Link Responsibilities, New Vulnerabilities? Olli Sotamaa & Heikki Tyni
Session 3: Research and practice 4 -
Reorientating Level Design Education Link Alex Muscat
A Link to the Past: Remaking The Legend of Zelda in 2020 Link Stephanie Boluk & Patrick LeMeiux
Game Design Research and Recoverability Link Rilla Khaled & Pippin Barr
Game-maker talk 2 10 Link -
Walkie Talkie: Post New-Wave Australiana Terry Burdak
Terry Burdak is a Melbourne based game developer, graphic designer and printer. He is creative lead at Paper House, which released the award winning Paperbark in 2018. After graduating at RMIT, he has worked with various organisations in the local industry, including; the GDAA, Girls Geek Academy, City of Melbourne, Creative Victoria, League of Geeks & 2pt Interactive.
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Wednesday
Session 4: Training game-makers 5 -
Curating contemporary Melbourne Gamemakers: How the N/A challenges of archiving contemporary videogames can be a tool for educating students on the conditions of local production and the role of community in gamemaking. Helen Stuckey
Dismantling the Pipeline: Challenging Labour and Identity Norms N/A in Games Higher Education Alison Harvey
Drawing Dreams: Concept Art and Illustration's Role in the Link Production-Oriented Videogame Amateur Christian McCrea
Game-maker talk 3 10 Link -
How Necrobarista Was Funded Kevin Chen
Born in Taichung, Kevin Chen moved to Australia at the age of 5 with his family. At the age of 15, he returned to Taiwan in order to finish high school before returning to Australia where he now resides in Melbourne. With a burning passion for Games, Visual Novels and Anime, he founded Route 59 in 2015 in order to create narrative games that explore the intersection between these mediums. Route 59s’ debut title is Necrobarista, a 3d visual novel set in a supernatural cafe where the dead are given one last night to mingle with the living.
Thursday
Session 5: Centres and Peripheries 6 -
Pirate, Grassroots and Low Tech Tool Communities: Negative Link Spaces of the Games Industry Emilie Reed
Discoverability Now Link Bart Simon & Jessie Marchessault
Non-Digital Indie Game Development Link Casey O’Donnell
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Session 6: Local and Global 7 - Scenes as Palimpsests: The Production of Local Games in a Global Industry Link Chris J Young
The Southern Chinese Indie Games Production Hugh Davies Link
Digital Cultural Preservation of Hong Kong in Video Game Peichi Chung N/A
Friday
Session 7: Politics 8 - Videogame Production’s Ludopolitical Labor Regime and its Multidimensional Inequalities Link Ergin Bulut
A mask, a cover: Strategies of invisibility and labour organising in the UK videogame industry Link Paolo Ruffino & Jamie Woodcock
The Carbon Costs of Game Development Ben Abraham Link
Beyond Hope & Passion: Finding Voice and Building Knowledge Together Aphra Kerr & Josh Moody Link
Session 8: Labour 9 - Who Rules the Working Game? Citizenship at Work in Videogame Studios Link Johanna Weststar & Marie-Josée Legault
From Crunch to Grind: Adopting a Servitization Model within Extreme Working Time Regimes Link Johanna Weststar & Louis-Étienne Dubois
Gamework on the page: Text-Based Research Methods for Studying Game Production Cultures Link Amanda C Cote & Brandon C Harris
Workshop closing comments Link Brendan Keogh
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Zone map
Link: https://researching-gamemaking.glitch.me (Password: qut)
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Abstracts and bios
Session 1: Platformisation
Battle Pass Capitalism Daniel Joseph
This article investigates the origin, circulation, and consumption of a new commodity—the “battle pass”—in the complex ludic economies of contemporary digital games. The article dives deep into the history and political economy of battle royale shooters and the game Apex Legends (2019), a free-to-play example of the genre monetized in part by a battle pass. Inspired and in dialog with Nieborg and Poell’s (2018) theory of platformization this paper asks questions related to how digital games like this operationalize their status as “contingent commodities”. The article then engages in an “app walkthrough” (Light, Burgess, & Dugay, 2018) of Apex Legends, analysing its vision, operating model, and governance. The focus here is on revealing the “mediator characteristics” that structure in-game commodities like avatar skins, loot boxes, and the battle pass. There is then a discussion and theorization of these monetization strategies and the industry-wide tendencies for consumerism they signal. A key take-away is that digital consumption in games is at once both easy to “see” but also highly abstracted, making it very difficult to pull apart what people are actually consuming when they engage with the monetization layer of contemporary digital games.
Bio Dr. Daniel Joseph is a Senior Lecturer of Digital Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University where he researches the political economy and consumption of the internet, games, apps and platforms. Daniel's prior research has focused on a variety of topics such as cultural and industrial policy related to the production of games, the politics of the digital game distribution platform Steam, and the role digital technology plays in Marxist crisis theory. Daniel is a member of the App Studies Initiative, an international research network, where his current research focuses on digital inequalities and the effects of economic and cultural imperialism on the production and consumption of digital culture. Daniel has forthcoming articles on how digital platforms and games have shaped contemporary consumerism, as well as the history and return of the concept of "technological sovereignty" to the economic and cultural toolkits of the state.
Ambivalent Platformization: Livestreaming and Indie Game Development Felan Parker & Matthew Perks
Without question, livestreaming is changing the industry and culture of digital games. Twitch in particular has been built up as the platform for professional and amateur streamers alike to broadcast themselves performing play and vie for the elusive social and economic rewards of
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online celebrity. Viewers consume billions of hours on a monthly basis, interacting with streamers and fellow spectators in live chat in ways that spill onto social media and ripple outward to shape popular tastes, modes of communication, cultural attitudes, and dominant play styles in gaming culture (Taylor, 2018). Twitch and competing platforms like YouTube (and their parent corporations Amazon and Google) extract massive profits from all this engagement via advertising, sponsorship deals, and various fees, guiding user attention to specific channels via front page ranking and recommendation algorithms. Commercial game makers at all scales of production have increasingly come to rely on and incorporate streaming into every stage of the game development cycle. Mainstream hits like Fortnite and League of Legends owe their ongoing status as bonafide pop cultural phenomena in no small part to their massive uptake by celebrity and amateur streamers alike, and triple-A releases from major publishers can reliably expect significant attention on streaming platforms, in some cases achieved by paying streamers directly to play. The costs and benefits of streaming for lower-budget, smaller independent game developers, however, are less clear.
Based on interviews with commercial indie game developers in Toronto and Montréal, this paper critically examines different discourses around streaming and commercial indie games, shifting from the platform/content creator relationship to focus on developer perceptions of streaming and its impacts on indie game making practices. Indie developers are acutely aware of the importance of streaming in the contemporary game industry ecosystem, but they lack the resources, brand recognition, and dedicated marketing teams of big-budget giants. There is a persistent popular myth that livestreaming and related forms of online content creation are a golden key to indie game “discoverability” and ultimately sales, and that Twitch streamers, YouTubers, and other gaming content creators and influencers are the new gatekeepers of indie success. In spite of popular success stories, there remains a high level of uncertainty about the factors that led to a given game’s success, leaving many indie developers ambivalent about leveraging influencer attention for sales even as they commit significant time and energy trying to doing so. In a recent Gamasutra article about the promotional potential of streaming, one indie studio’s community manager offers only “a general shrug” in conclusion (Tran, 2020). Are streamers the golden key to success, a necessary cost of doing business, or platform capitalist snake oil? In addition to game consoles, digital distribution, and game engines, online content creation can be seen as yet another layer of platformization shaping the contemporary game industry (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Chia et al, 2020). The analysis presented in this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the stakes of independent cultural work in this context.
Bios Felan Parker is Assistant Professor of Book & Media Studies at St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto, and a scholar of media industries and cultures specializing in games, digital media, and film. His ongoing research, supported from 2016-2019 by the Indie Interfaces SSHRC Insight Development Grant, explores the production, distribution, and reception of independent or “indie” digital games with a particular focus on the role of intermediary actors like curators, critics, and community organizers in the cultural ecosystem of the game industry. He is also co-investigator on the Swarming Comic-Con SSHRC Insight Grant, a collaborative
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ethnographic research endeavour that examines the famous San Diego Comic-Con and its cultural and economic resonance across entertainment industries.
Matthew E. Perks is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo in the department of Sociology & Legal Studies. His research focuses on the shifting role of community management in the video game industry and how community managers (of both game studios and livestreaming content creators) encourage pro-social behaviour in their communities. His work has been published in Games and Culture, Leisure Sciences, and Media Industries.
Game-making and platformisation: Lessons learned? David Nieborg
Are games special? For years, if not decades, the answer was a resounding ‘Yes’. Game journalists, industry professionals, and scholars keep pointing to the combination of the game industry’s growing economic might and its relentless focus on technological innovation. As noted by Therrien (2019: 40), the “mindset of obsolescence capitalism has been naturalized” in the game community. There is always a new “generation” of platforms just around the corner. Considering this mindset, one could see that those who are immersed in this anticipatory discourse do consider games to be special.
This contribution both challenges and affirms this naturalized idea of an industry driven by the diffusion of platforms, be they Xboxes or iPhones. It builds on and critiques the relationship between game-making and platformisation by asking a two-part question: What can research under the wider umbrella of “platformisation” tell us about studying game-making? And vice versa: How does game (production) studies inform our understanding of the broader conversation about platformisation? By answering these two questions I aim to make explicit the disciplinary trappings of both research projects.
The former research project consists of a set of papers discussing “the platformisation of cultural production” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Duffy et al., 2019; Nieborg et al., 2020). This body of work engages directly with game studies and starts from the premise that the digital game industry is special in the sense that digital games have always been “platform-dependent” media. Moreover, digital games are theorized as “contingent cultural commodities,” that is, they are 1) contingent on the economic, infrastructural and governmental frameworks set out by platform companies, and 2) they are inherently unstable texts as they are constantly updated, revised, and modular in designed.
The latter research project is work in both game production studies (Chia et al., 2020; Foxman, 2019) and (game) platform studies (Montfort & Bogost, 2009; Therrien, 2019). Here we find detailed analyses of game production tools and distribution platforms, or combinations thereof. While some of this work supports the argument that game tools and platforms are part of a broader transformation of the cultural industries that includes platformisation (Foxman, 2019), others have called to “decentre” platformisation as a logic (Chia et al., 2020). The questions that
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emerges from these different perspectives is: Are games indeed special? If so, what is to be gained by bringing both research projects into dialogue? And, what, if anything, is lost by “decentring” the structuring logic of platforms?
Bio David B. Nieborg is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Toronto. He published two dozen papers on the economics of platforms, the game industry, and games journalism. Currently he is finishing two co-authored books: Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity) & Mainstreaming and Games Journalism (MIT Press).
Session 2: Data and automation
Agency and Automation in Digital Game Production Aleena Chia
Agency is a keyword in the study of digital games. Agency is, however, at an inflection point in cognate fields of critical theory and media studies. Feminists have proposed ecological frameworks for living ethically in the Anthropocene by reconceptualizing capitalism through complex interdependencies and multispecies commons instead of the agency of individuals or institutions (Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 2009; Tsing 2015). Posthumanists have critiqued Western humanist ideals of reason and autonomy as masculinist, ethnocentric, and anthropocentric (Braidotti 2016) and proposed cognitive assemblages to understand linguistic and volitional acts as emergent from nonconscious biological and algorithmic processes and environments (Hayles 2017). According to this scholarship, once we shift the primary unit of analysis from the properties of objects and boundaries of bodies to intra-acting phenomena, it becomes clear that “agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world” (Barad 2007: 141). This shift requires a reworking of causality, which has been undertaken in game studies by decentering hegemonic play practices configured around goal-based challenges and mastery (Keogh 2018), and by using speculative design to challenge assumptions about humans as separate causal agents in locative media’s material entanglements with devices, interfaces, and infrastructures (Leorke and Wood 2019).
This paper investigates the interplay between agency and automation in trade and popular discourses about computational creativity in digital game production by qualitatively analyzing industry talks at the Game Developers Conference and games journalism on procedural content generation. Philips et al. (2016) differentiate between stochastic and deterministic procedural content generation in video game production: the former is considered part of creative authorship because it is deployed in systems capable of producing and evaluating its own work; the latter is framed through the language of labor saving and automation as ways to populate vast virtual environments. Wilf (2018) contends that innovation industries such as consulting routinizes, formalizes, and rationalizes human creativity—understood as an unruly
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property—into a manageable and reliable resource through ritual communicative events. Irani (2018, 8) maintains that claims about automation are frequently claims about kinds of people: “this vision of the machine─as in people, as in things─generated new visions of the properly human and less than human." Innovation discourses such as design thinking set up a hierarchy in which product and market strategy are linked to personal biographies and seen as too “creative” to outsource, while industrial and mechanical design and manufacturing functions are rendered easy and interchangeable. Drawing from these authors in feminist science and technology studies as well as the critical race studies of outsourcing (Roberts 2019; Grohmann and Qiu 2020) and automation (Nakamura 2020; Amrute 2016; Andrejevic 2020) in media technologies, this paper asks how computational creativity in game production inflects the neoliberal coupling of innovation and personhood, as well as how it reorients the posthumanist politics of agency.
Bio Aleena Chia is an ethnographer of media and an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She researches practices at the margins of the digital and analogue, and in the interstices of work and play: bureaucratization in gaming hobbies, Consciousness Hacking communities of practice, and social media disconnection.
On Data-Driven Game Development: New proficiencies, new responsibilities, new vulnerabilities? Olli Sotamaa & Heikki Tyni
Ranging from platform-specific production requirements and novel business models like free-to-play to a constant stream of live player updates, many recent developments in game making have centre-staged data-driven game development strategies (Whitson 2019). Continuous flows of data and platformised production logics are not only reshaping our ideas of game design but also transforming workplace practices, the self-understanding of creative practitioners, and broader governance structures (Kerr 2017). Studios, teams and individuals need to engage in different kinds of production efforts that lie outside of the traditional core of game development (e.g. Tyni 2020). The lifecycle of game production changes as marketing, financing, and direct customer service all need to be considered both much earlier in the production cycle and (in the case of successful titles) also years after the launch of the game. This paper highlights selected early results from an online survey conducted among Finnish game developers. The focus is on game making related data practices and the motivations and challenges associated with them. In addition to highlighting how studios organize data-intense processes, we also want to discuss how everyday data-driven development practices feel like. We are very interested in the negotiations between game studios’ formal data strategies and individual game developers’ relationship with the data. By connecting original empirical research of data analytics and marketing practices to recent discussions about precariousness of video game development (Bulut 2020, Sotamaa & Svelch 2020), this paper aims at showing how creativity, sustainability, and vulnerability are renegotiated in the data-driven workplace.
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The study is part of the Finnish Strategic Research Council funded research project Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA) that analyses the impact of datafication on social roles and relations, as well as the vulnerabilities that it gives rise to. The study is informed by prior game production studies related research conducted in the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, Tampere University, Finland (funded by Academy of Finland).
Bios Olli Sotamaa is an Associate Professor at the Tampere University and a team leader at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (2018-2025). He is the editor (with Jan Švelch) of Game Production Studies (Amsterdam University Press 2021).
Heikki Tyni
Videogames and the data analytic imaginary Ben Egliston
Data analytics software are increasingly adopted in game development (taken as game design and a range of other related activities, such as advertising), claiming to discover and communicate patterns in data about our tastes, habits, values and worth. Existing scholarly accounts, drawing from ethnographic methods, have offered valuable insight into how analytics are shaping the socio-technical process of ‘doing’ game development (Whitson, 2019). Taking the study of game development analytics in a different direction, this paper focuses on the discursive formation of these tools. In so doing I draw from writers outside game studies, like Beer (2018) and Kitchin (2014), who suggest that data is not understood simply in its material instantiation, as “numbers, characters, symbols, images, sounds, electromagnetic waves, bits” (Kitchin, 2014:1), but through discursive formations and flourishes of rhetoric. These formations – always informed by society, culture, economy, etc. – have the potential to shape our perception of the world (see Jasanoff, 2015)
This paper looks at a range of popular data analytics tools, which generally fall into six categories. These are tools offering ‘broad’ usage metrics (e.g. Downloads, installations/uninstallations, user growth rate etc), engagement metrics (retention rate, monthly active users, session length, etc), revenue focuses metrics (e.g. lifetime revenue of users, average cost of new acquisitions, Average Revenue per User, Customer Lifetime Value), user experience metrics (e.g. Load time, device information, OS), marketing metrics (e.g. demographics, geo-metrics), app store optimization (e.g. keywords, category rankings, reviews, views to installs, etc).
In exploring the discourses of data analytics tools, I’m occupied with two main research questions: 1) what are the visions for a desirable game development future that data analytics supposedly create, and 2) what values, agencies and identities get realised (and what don’t) through such a future of game development? Doing so, I aim to understand how data driven
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logics find themselves within game development, asking how they stabilise authority and credibility and ‘sell’ a coherent and positive vision of development with data.
Bio Ben Egliston is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology. His current research projects are about the use of data analytics in the development of videogames, and the politics of emerging ‘mixed reality’ technologies.
Session 3: Research and practice
Reorienting Level Design Education Alexander Muscat
Videogame level design is a field uniquely influenced by many different contextual factors. These encompass existing game designs, intended game experiences, and the platforms and tools in which a game is developed and levels constructed (Totten 2014). As such, level design has been particularly affected by platformisation (Nicoll and Keogh 2019), for example, a lack of ubiquity or standardisation in tools (Storm 2016). This has led designers to find multidisciplinary solutions that include repurposing software platforms, creating new design tools to replicate older methods and techniques (Rossen 2020), and use of iteratively developed features gradually integrated into major platforms over update cycles.
Because of these contextual factors what can be considered ‘best’ practices or even level design methods are in themselves a contested space. For educators teaching videogame level design these developments and questions present significant challenges; what can be considered appropriate or suitable when teaching level design concepts and techniques within a practically-oriented context? Challenges include questions of platform viability, tool accessibility, assumed technical knowledge, game context, and cultural relevance (Yang 2017). Responses may include eschewing digital environments to adopt paper-prototyping methods (Fullerton 2014), however within videogame level design these questions remain ever present.
As a lens into these questions I will describe a class in videogame Level Design offered at RMIT University, aimed towards students both accustomed to and unfamiliar with game design and development. Discussion will focus on how these challenges were negotiated to deliver a practically-oriented level design syllabus, and highlight insights found in an alternative framing of level design, oriented towards player experiences and multiple intermingled historic and contemporary contexts.
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Bio Alexander Muscat teaches videogame development at RMIT University. He holds a PhD in design and researches videogame spatial-exploration, player perception, design methods and histories. His work includes medical rehabilitation technologies and award-nominated experimental game ‘WORLD4’.
A Link to the Past: Remaking The Legend of Zelda in 2020 Stephanie Boluk & Patrick LeMieux
In Jorge Luis Borges’ famous short story “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote” (1939), the eponymous author succeeds in recreating Miguel de Cervantes’ novel line-by-line but, despite the absurd thoroughness of his process, creates a different experience altogether. Borges’ parable about the impossibility of historical reenactment articulates both the central problem of history and a potential method for making art. But what if we tried to remake a classic videogame instead of a classic work of fiction? What if we made a metagame instead of a piece of metafiction? Following the work of artists like Rhonda Roland Shearer (who attempted to remake Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages [1913-14] in the early 1990s), this presentation, will discuss the philosophical and technical aspects of remaking videogames through a Let’s Play of Triforce, a short puzzle game in which we attempted to remake the Legend of Zelda. In The Legend of Zelda, there are several strange spaces hidden around Hyrule that defy the logic of the Cartesian grid: the Lost Woods, the Lost Hills, and the Lost Roads. When navigating these 2D mazes, Link finds himself endlessly looping, temporarily arrested by a classic gaming trope. But when visualized in 3D, these labyrinths start to look different. Triforce features a non-Cartesian Hyrule full of donuts, Möbius strips, and Klein bottles as well as other secrets folded within the topologies of Zelda. Using Triforce as the case study, this talk will explore the ways in which technicity, experience, and remaking come together in order to explore what can be learned—as well as what can’t be learned—through this media archaeological method of remaking.
Bios Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Boluk play, make, and write about games at the University of California, Davis. They are co-authors of Metagaming, co-creators of metagames like Triforce: The Topologies of Zelda, and cast members on Every Game in This City. For more information visit http://patrick-lemieux.com and http://stephanieboluk.com.
Game Design Research and Recoverability Rilla Khaled & Pippin Barr
What is game design research in terms of epistemology and methodology? Where does it fit amongst game-adjacent research disciplines? Where does it stand out from or destabilise
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those disciplines? What is lacking in our methodological toolkit? What hinders us from asking and answering the same kinds of questions as our non-academic practitioner peers?
We will address these questions and more. Our work is motivated by a desire to create a space for game design research that acknowledges the close relationship between making and articulation, the special insights a maker has into their creations, but also the fragility of context.
Specifically lacking in current approaches to game design research are methods - even loosely defined - that invite something akin to rigour. We seek something akin to rigour because rigour may be misleading and perhaps irrelevant in the context of design practice. After all, in design, identical problems are rarely repeated, designerly intuition is key, and aesthetics play a significant role. Instead we align with recoverability, referring to a designer-researcher's need to ensure that “the process is recoverable by anyone interested in subjecting the research to critical scrutiny” (Godin and Zahedi 2014).
In our work, everything flows from the following: knowledge is embedded in designed artifacts. We will present the MDM method for game design research (Barr, Khaled, and Lessard 2020), which draws on prototyping theory, reflective practice, interaction design, software development, and qualitative research.
Drawing on almost three years of experience applying the MDM method to over 20 game projects, we will discuss each element of the method alongside evidence from its application. Focusing on a single, continuous example of using MDM, we will take the audience from the earliest stages of conceptualization through design, prototyping, implementation, and eventual project release, showing the insights that can be gleaned from this methodological approach
By the conclusion of our presentation, we hope to have both demonstrated the specific, technical details of MDM as well as gone some way to convince our audience of its validity and value in game design research in general, and critical game making in particular.
Bio Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where she teaches interaction design, serious game design, and programming, among other subjects. She is the director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, Canada's most well-established games research lab, in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. Dr. Khaled's research is focused on the use of interactive technologies to improve the human condition, a career-long passion that has led to diverse outcomes, including designing award-winning serious games, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, developing a framework for game design specifically aimed at reflective outcomes, and working with Indigenous communities to use contemporary technologies to imagine new, inclusive futures.
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Pippin Barr is an Assistant Professor in Computation Arts at Concordia University and Associate Director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. He creates videogames addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to dystopian post-work futures to re-telling mythological stories of punishment as games of chess. Pippin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and wrote a book called How To Play a Video Game. His website, pippinbarr.com, collects all his creative activities into one place.
Session 4: Training game-makers
Curating contemporary Melbourne Gamemakers: How the challenges of archiving contemporary videogames can be a tool for educating students on the conditions of local production and the role of community in gamemaking Helen Stuckey
A consistent complaint levelled by local industry against tertiary education in videogame design is that they fail to provide students with a sufficient level of professional acumen. That recent graduates have a poor grasp of the business of games and the realities of finding an audience 1 for their games to sustain practice. In 2018 I developed a class directed at meeting this challenge. However, it was not packaged within professional practice, but explored the contemporary challenges of the local games industry through the lens of videogames preservation and history. For 3 years I have conducted a class on archiving contemporary Melbourne videogames working in partnership with the RMIT Design Archives and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It is a class for final year students from the Bachelor of Design (Games) at RMIT University and we have worked with four local Melbourne developers over three years providing a durational study of their practice.
At one level the class addresses the vulnerability of contemporary games and explores curation as an active lifetime tool for preservation. A growing dependence on proprietary platforms means that both the games and the evidence of how communities play them and played with them may quickly disappear(Lowood, 2004; Newman, 2008, 2012).
At another level, the students research projects – created with our audience of imagined “future researchers” in mind - turns a critical lens on contemporary game making practice. Questions of a gamemaking practice therefore are entangled with a historian’s eye to questions of the importance of various local subcultures. Funding and financial models are unpicked across the differing personal narratives of games application and impact. Measures of success and failure
1 This statement draws on personal experience as Games Program Manager RMIT 2009 – 2011 and 2017 – 2019 and Steering committee membership and review panels for Swinburne, Griffith University and SAE Games degrees between 2009 and 2020.
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are deeply entwined with individual creative ambitions, peer esteem and the pursuit of a sustainable futures in gamemaking locally.
In this paper I will argue how this pedagogical approach creates rich archival resources for future researchers (and contemporary exhibition) and, importantly, engages students directly with the nuances of local games production, highlighting the complex conditions that underpin local gamemaking. Swalwell argues that games history does “not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter”(Swalwell, 2015). This contemporary record of Melbourne gamemaking serves as a tool to imbed and educate graduates on the characteristics of local production and reflect on how factors such as community and platformisation impact in how games are made.
Bio Dr Helen Stuckey is a Senior Lecturer in the Bachelor of Design (Games) at RMIT University. Her research practice focuses on Australian videogames history, the cultural significance of videogames and their collection and exhibition within the gallery.
Dismantling the Pipeline: Challenging Labour and Identity Norms in Games Higher Education Alison Harvey
Within the emerging field of games production studies, critical approaches to informal and formal contexts of education have been vital for understanding how these contribute to established norms related to exclusion and exploitation persisting in the industry (Ashton, 2009, 2011; Harvey, 2019, 2020). Work on informal education has been particularly valuable for outlining possible challenges to these norms (Fisher & Harvey, 2013), though these interventions have themselves been associated with resistance from within the hegemonic mainstream of games (Harvey & Shepherd, 2016). Perhaps most troublingly, the increasing emphasis on higher education qualifications as a prerequisite for work in the games industry can play a role in negating the value of informal initiatives as they focus on narrow trajectories encapsulated in the discourse of the ‘talent pipeline’. Necessitating a linear route from often technologically-sophisticated degree education to employment in the games industry devalues DIY making supported by the democratization of games, a move that impacts on those marginalized in games who engage with design via this route.
The turn to thinking about ‘getting into’ games as a question of a ‘leaky pipeline’ also brings with it a load of conceptual baggage well-studied by STEM scholars (Metcalf, 2010) who note that as an approach to challenging inequities has a tendency to homogenize those within what remains an opaque pipeline while disregarding diverse pathways (Xie & Shauman, 2003), the intersectional challenges faced within white, male cultures (Carlone & Johnson), and the enduring hostility of the games industry for those who have been historically marginalized
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(Weststar & Legault, 2018). In this talk, I argue against this metaphor and propose new ways of envisioning the relationship between games education and work.
To do so, I draw on my qualitative mixed-methods research within UK formal games programmes, which vividly illustrate the problems with the pipeline metaphor. Interviews with women in these contexts demonstrates that measures to increase the representation of women and other marginalized communities in tech need to recognize the cultures in which they are seeking to induct them. Efforts to ‘get in’ to spaces based on pipeline discourses fail to account for how these environments require marginalized people to undertake tremendous effort to develop strategies for coping with exclusionary norms to ‘stay in’. This ultimately leaves unchallenged the structures that maintain the more visible problems of sexism, harassment, and exploitation in games.
I then use this context to open up questions about the future of this domain of production research. Beyond its role in supporting dominant modes of working in games, what directions do games education indicate for new analytic and action-based research? How does dismantling the pipeline discourse generate new possibilities for (re)considering the relationship between education and work, and what possibilities for more sustainable and equitable production might it enable?
Bio Alison Harvey is Assistant Professor in Communications at Glendon College, York University. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labour in digital games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015, Routledge) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity). Her work has also appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including Games & Culture, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media & Society, and Studies in Social Justice.
Drawing Dreams: Concept Art and Illustration’s Role in the Production-Oriented Videogame Amateur Christian McCrea
Recent scholarship in Game Studies points to new directions for understanding settings and multi-format game work outside of ‘narrative’ and even the confines of an intellectual property framework, such as Matthias Fuchs’ Phantasmal Spaces (2020). Further back, Laurie Taylor's 2007 chapter "Networking Power: Videogame Structure From Concept Art" accurately positions concept art in games as forming a function expectation that game production often "seeks to emulate and verify". Taylor accounts for several ways in which concept art produces networks of knowledge which then create relationships between players and creators. Extending Taylor's analysis to 2013's games culture, we can also see how concept art 'underwrites' or establishes
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the worth of a game concept for use in professional (pitching, representation to other developers).
Much peripheral concept art attached to games is in the public sphere - but it is clear that concept art is by no means a universal practice in games. Concept art, in some cases, exists in and around the game's community and underwrites something else entirely - the value of the game to its creatively-capable players, which produces new social power for the game and its developers. Game Studies has been content in many cases to develop an idea of fan and player art as 'paratextual' (ie, Mia Consalvo's rich expansion of the concept in the book Cheating), which certainly accounts for some extant visual art cultures around games.
What this paper will propose is that rather than this sort of work and creativity being positioned as pre-production elements, or fan culture at the other end, we might generate productive analyses from understanding concept art as a "videogame vernacular", following Jean Burgess’s model from 2006. This is a vernacular that is rooted of course in imaginative capacity of the viewer, but which gives us a way to view and understand the work of many thousands of young artists globally, intent on developing artwork intended for the videogame production system. There is now a unique ideation-focused game videogame concept art and illustration culture. This paper will then launch from concept art to other forms of amateur ideation in self-identified game designers and artists and proposes that, as other creative fields have done, we can interpret this sort of work in an autotelic way.
Bio Christian McCrea
Session 5: Centres and Peripharies
Pirate, Grassroots and Low Tech Tool Communities: Negative Spaces of the Games Industry Emilie Reed
This talk builds on research expanding the remit of game studies beyond mainstream industry practices. Relevant work has considered the emergence of “indie” titles, and the influence of “everyday gamemakers,” arguing for a broader accounting “of the much broader field of creative practice that the formal videogame industry is... embedded within” (Lipkin 2012; Young 2018; Keogh 2018, 17). Historical work has also brought attention to alternate practices in small-scale game-making before Indie Games (Švelch 2013; Polansky 2016). Tracing practices of game-making and distribution that are difficult to address within an industry, commercial, or institutional perspective on videogames, I will identify three main “negative spaces” that are both excluded from and co-constitutive of mainstream videogame production.
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Piracy utilizes digital distribution capacities of the internet to gather materials and share work outside of official commercial contexts for videogames. Graeme Kirkpatrick notes the construction of piracy within videogames discourse was imposed on a context where code copying and sharing was previously foundational (Kirkpatrick 2016). Piracy creates resilient networks compared to the problems of inaccessibility DRM, IP law and capitalist demands have on videogame availability, and has played a major role in games preservation (Newman 2013). Pirate distribution networks are a norm in certain countries and online contexts, and piracy can supplement and even become a creative practice in itself (Hurel 2016; Jo 2020).
Grassroots tools emerge from communities rather than being imposed upon them by the demands of the industry or industry-controlled distribution networks. These tools often make a particular type of game, provide a visual interface and a lightweight software application or web app, and allow the resulting games to be freely distributed and edited. In some cases, the tool itself is open source, allowing the community to add or change features through modding. In addition to lowering skill and cost barriers to game-making, they also encourage different attitudes and goals than industry standard tools.
Low tech tools resist the cycles of rapid planned obsolescence identified in James Newman's study of the game industry, Best Before (2012). These practices often stem from an awareness of the problematic supply chains, e-waste, and increased energy demands associated with frequent technological upgrades (Westaway 2015). They also lead to the creation and distribution of videogames becoming more accessible in a context where internet speeds and hardware requirements that are taken for granted in locations with a thriving official videogame industry do not exist. Inspired by the approach of Kris De Decker's LOW←TECH MAGAZINE, game-making approaches which resist a linear narrative of technological improvement can often revisit forgotten solutions, opening up alternative histories of the form (De Decker 2020).
While the games industry often foregrounds abstractions and idealization that videogames are marketed as constantly moving towards, these qualities follow “game studies' material turn,” working within the particular gaps that evade the lines of vision of the formalized game industry (Apperley and Jayemanne 2012). These categories generate provocative questions about the discursive formation of videogames and the videogame industry, and what is often excluded from this framing.
Bio Emilie Reed is a curator, researcher and writer who recently received her PhD from Abertay University for a dissertation which combined art history and new media perspectives with game studies to better present videogames in arts contexts. Her writing has appeared in ToDiGRA and the edited volume Indie Games in the Digital Age as well as gaming press sites like EGM and Rock Paper Shotgun. She has also co-curated exhibitions like The Blank Arcade 2016, and Pixels X Paper at the Babycastles gallery, in addition to running online writing jams and zine workshops for the Now Play This festival’s zine library. Her current focus is incorporating diverse indie, DIY and experimental approaches to videogame creation into gaming history.
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Discoverability Now Bart Simon & Jessie Marchessault
This paper explores current discussions and debates surrounding the challenges of ‘discoverability’, visibility and engagement within the independent games industry. By analyzing the tensions faced by independent developers in Montréal as they negotiate the desire to maintain creative agency while seeking long term financial sustainability, we identify the challenges inherent in the everyday workings of independent games studios. The demand for discoverability arrives as a twin response to perceptions of the saturation of the market for indie games and the call for more responsiveness and adaptability on the part of the indie game developers. In this sense discoverability can be seen as a cultural economic externality structuring the working lives of developers and the consumption of their games by players. At the same time however, the pressure to become discoverable is pushing developers into new kinds of relationships with players with the potential effect of unsettling older models of authorship and autonomy in indie game production. In this sense, discoverability may lead to new kinds of player-developer community based markets which might chart a different path to economic and cultural sustainability.
The reflections and insights discussed in this paper emerge from onsite interviews and ethnographic research conducted at GamePlay Space (GPS), an indie game developer co-working space located in Montréal which is home to approximately thirty two indie games studios with over 100 individual members. GamePlay Space is an example of an emerging style of workspaces that have been created for startups, freelancers, self-employed cultural workers in order to mitigate ‘precarity – or the social, financial and existential insecurities exacerbated by unstable employment in contemporary capitalism’ (de Peuter). The space exclusively caters to studios and individuals working with, for, and on video games. Working under the auspices of the Indie Interfaces research group, this study is a part of a three year research project funded by the Quebec Government, called the - GPS Discoverability Engine. The aims of this “Discoverability Engine” is to find ways to measure, track, and uncover key factors behind discoverability and the attention economy in the indie gaming industry. The research project looks at how indies react to, and cope with, the need to "do" discoverability as part of the development process and how attention to discoverability changes both understandings of indie devs, audiences/players and intermediaries.
Non-Digital Indie Game Development Casey O’Donnell
Much recent attention has been paid to the social, cultural and political-economic worlds of independent (“Indie”) videogame developers. The rise of digital distribution platforms and devices that make the once traditional model of developer / publisher / big-box-store have all but
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vanished. The case for non-digital games, however, remains very much reminiscent of the 1980s and 1990s models of the videogame industry. Despite the meteoric rise of “eurogames” and the increasing prevalence of non-digital games being Kickstarted like their independent digital counterparts, the structure of independent non-digital games requires a much older model of publishing and distribution. This talk begins to tackle the complex world of independent non-digital game development as a means of dipping Game Studies and Game Production Studies into the study of non-digital game production.
Casey O'Donnell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. His research examines the creative collaborative work of videogame design and development. His first book, Developer's Dilemma was published by MIT Press in 2014.
Session 6: Local and global
Scenes as Palimpsests: The Production of Local Games in a Global Industry Chris J. Young
In this paper, I propose the notion of scenes as palimpsests to examine the inscription of everyday gamemakers’ cultural norms and practices in local game production. Borrowing Will Straw’s (2004) notion of ‘cultural scenes’ and Gérard Genette’s (1997 [1982]) concept of ‘palimpsest’, I analyse how gamemakers inscribe local and global industry norms and practices upon the locations, genres of cultural production, and social activities of game production scenes. That is, I reveal how the physical and virtual infrastructures of scenes are used by gamemakers to make local games in a global industry. Inscription can refer to textual and other forms of semiotic transmission and dissemination, such as making games with digital tools, sharing images and documents on community forums, and conversing through social media. While inscription implies textual-based communication, the emphasis here is to note the created explicit knowledge (i.e., documents) and not the ephemeral and fleeting moments of communication that are remembered as tacit knowledge (i.e., memory). The scene has numerous physical and virtual spaces for gamemakers to engage in game production, including game jams, festivals, socials, exhibitions, workshops, talks, and conferences. Many of these spaces are controlled by arts-based organizations, post-secondary institutions, public libraries, game companies, and industry platforms which have their own cultural norms and practices of game production. Gamemakers ‘make-do’ (Certeau, 1984) with these organizations and platforms to coordinate activities, share expertise, and to create a place for members of the scene to discuss their craft regardless of their geographic location. Based on a two-year ethnography of the Toronto gamemaker scene and its communities, I survey how gamemakers maintain and challenge the expected norms and practices of these organizations and platforms in the production of local games in a global industry.
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Bio Chris J. Young (PhD, University of Toronto) is a librarian and coordinator of Digital Scholarship, Archives & Special Collections at the University of Toronto Mississauga. His research interests include media industries, digital labor, and app economies. His current research contributes to scholarly and public debate about the increasing power and contentious politics of digital production platforms through his collaborative work at the App Studies Initiative.
The Southern Chinese Indie Games production Hugh Davies
China represents the largest game market in the globe – both in terms of production and consumption – yet Chinese game studies remain a remarkably underdeveloped subfield (Chew, 2019). Many of the world largest-earning and most-played videogames never make it outside of the Chinese Mainland. As a result of this scholarly neglect, China’s game sector is at once both centre and periphery in the global video games imagination.
Confusing matters further, China’s diverse ecology of game makers and the issues they face tend to be depicted as homogenous in Western discourse. However, the country’s game content, culture, and industries are expansive, varied and rapidly evolving while also differing significantly from those of the United States and Europe to which it is often compared (Chew, 2011). Game production in Southern China takes place in a distinct cultural, political and social milieu.
This paper brings light to the production of independent games in the South of China. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research undertaken in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen between 2017 and 2019, considered here is how community-led support networks for independent game makers have emerged and developed in that region. In these settings, videogame production is increasingly embraced as a cultural industry over technological entrepreneurship. In exploring the nuances of this terrain, this paper introduces the distinctly Chinese trichotomy of games production and design. Explored here is how China’s indie sector has arisen as a reaction, not to the Triple A sector as Keogh outlines has occurred in the West (Keogh, 2015), but to the strain of variously named ‘Chinese Style Online Games’ (Chew, 2019), ‘Capital Games’ (Xiong, 2017) or ‘guochanyouxi’ (Anon, 2010).
Bio Hugh Davies is an artist, curator and researcher. His practice explores games and play in the Asia Pacific Region. Awarded a PhD in Art, Design and Architecture from Monash University in 2014, Davies’s research has been supported with fellowships from Tokyo Art and Space, M+ Museum of Visual Culture and the Hong Kong Design Trust. Davies is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at RMIT in Melbourne, and serves on the board of China’s Digital Games and Research Association.
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Digital Cultural Preservation of Hong Kong in Video Games Peichi Chung
This paper uses the concept of digital curation to study the cultural production of Hong Kong in video games. The purpose of this project is to review video games that use Hong Kong as the location to design stories. Since the 1990s, Japanese and American video game studios have developed interest in producing games that depict Hong Kong as a pan-Asian imaginative city from the East. The games focus on Hong Kong triad stories and demonstrate the city filled with neon light in cyberpunk style. In video game, Hong Kong is noted for the urban setting where triad, Kung Fu and pre-modern Chinese street scenes define Hong Kong living under the British rule. As Hong Kong cinema has always been considered as the primary industry that creates and defines Hong Kong’s historical memory, this paper looks into the video game space to identify new and extended heritage to represent Hong Kong popular culture. The paper questions cultural significance when Hong Kong becomes playable. How do exotic play and nostalgic storytelling in video games redefine Hong Kong’s city identity in 2020 when Hong Kong heads toward a further political stage of sinization?
The paper will include two parts. The first part offers historical analysis of games that depict Hong Kong in the console and PC game categories. This section applies textual analysis of scenes and images that present Hong Kong as an exotic cyberpunk city. Most of the games studied are Japanese and American games from the 1990s to 2000s. This section especially focuses on international titles such as Shenmue and Sleeping Dogs to study the urban representation of Hong Kong. The second part of the paper chooses independent games developed by Hong Kong game developers. It reviews games that depict Hong Kong from local developer’s point of view. The games for textual analysis include Cage, A Summer’s End 1986, and The Glory Day 1988. These games respectively explore politics, sexuality and urbanization issues in Hong Kong society. The stories, however, explore nostalgic fantasy based upon stories about good old Hong Kong before 1997.
Bio Peichi Chung is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include video game culture, independent game and esports in Asia. She has published on topics related to game industries in various countries in Asia.
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Session 7: Politics
Videogame Production’s Ludopolitical Labor Regime and its Multidimensional Inequalities Ergin Bulut
This talk is an invitation to think about videogame production not simply as an economic process or transaction based on trade-offs (autonomy v.s. alienation) in the workplace between supposedly two equal parties. Rather, I propose to consider videogame production through the lens of inequality and as a problem of social reproduction rooted in politics. Based on my three-year-long ethnographic research in a triple-A studio in the United States, I ask: Who can play and who has to work in the global videogame industry? What does it mean to love your job when you work in the video game industry? If love is about mutual vulnerability, what is the politics of this romantic work relationship in videogame production?
In answering these questions, I propose the term “ludopolitics” to center inequality and social reproduction in the videogame industry. Ludopolitics refers to the complex assemblage of multidimensional, uneven power relations at the local and global level. Specifically, we are able to grasp various inequalities at multiple levels including a) at the level of studio between game developers and their parent company, b) between privileged creatives and game testers, c) at home between developers and their partners, and d) at the cultural level where a predominantly white male labor force exploits cultural stereotypes to maximize corporate profits in the name of love and creativity.
This new broad emphasis on inequality and social reproduction allows for shifting our focus from the abstract and psychological discourse of passionate work to a materialist investigation of love and labor. It allows for shifting our focus from labor (workplace) to life and life’s materiality. The conceptual move through ludopolitics is ultimately an invitation to become killjoys against the ludic futures of the digital economy in the age of pandemic where work and love have to be rescued from their essentialist, privatized and compulsory mode.
Bio Ergin Bulut is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University, Turkey. He researches and teaches in the areas of videogame studies, political economy of media industries, digital labor, and media and politics. He is the author of A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry.
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A mask, a cover: Strategies of invisibility and labour organising in the UK videogame industry Paolo Ruffino and Jamie Woodstock
This talk presents findings and observations collected following a period of participatory observation and interviews with board members of the labour union Game Workers Unite UK (GWU UK), across 2019 and 2020. GWU UK was officially founded in December 2018 as part of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). It is the first official national union of the global association Game Workers Unite (GWU). GWU UK presents itself as ‘a worker-led, democratic trade union that represents and advocates for UK game workers’ rights’ (GWU UK 2020). It aims to address unpaid overtime, unfair treatment and harassment, and improve diversity and inclusivity in the videogame industry. The talk argues that one of the major novelties of the organization consists in the strategies adopted to manage the visibility of their members in relation to their employers, other colleagues, and the general public. The same strategies have implications for board members who become over-exposed by the union’s activities.
Union organising in the videogame industry has for long been perceived with scepticism by those involved in the sector (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009; Woodcock 2016; Weststar and Legault 2019). Workers in the videogame industry have struggled to organise collectively, as becoming visibly oppositional at the workplace has been seen unfavourably by both employers and employees (O’Donnell 2014; Bulut 2020). This presentation argues that the strategies adopted by GWU UK to negotiate the visibility of union members in relation to their employers, other workers, potential new members and audiences on social media, introduce a radical shift in how workers perceive their own role within the industry. These strategies involve protection of the anonymity of their members at any stage, in social media communication and real-life meetings. Moreover, role-playing sessions are organised by local branches to train members on how to engage colleagues about work-related issues without exposing their affiliation to the union. Role-playing sessions also teach how to identify those who have hiring and firing powers, thus exposing the opaque hierarchies of power in the relaxed and informal workplaces of the videogame industry. In the words of research participants, the union acts as a ‘mask’, or ‘cover’, for their members. At the same time, board members become extremely exposed to their own employers: a not yet resolved implication for those who take administrative responsibilities.
These strategies shed new light on how labour is understood and organised in the creative economy and contemporary digital age (Woodcock 2020). It is symptomatic of a growing scepticism towards the individualism that is often predicated as being a requirement of creative expression and of ‘passion-driven’ industries (McRobbie 2016; Harvey and Shepherd 2017). The research finally contributes to ongoing debates around creative labour in the contemporary digital industries by exploring novel strategies of collective organization (Woodcock 2019; Woodcock and Graham 2020).
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Bios Paolo Ruffino is Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. He has been investigating the independent production of videogames, unionisation in the videogame industry, and nonhuman and posthuman play in the digital age. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths Press 2018) and editor of Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics (Routledge 2021).
Jamie Woodcock is a senior lecturer at the Open University and a researcher based in London. He is the author of The Gig Economy (Polity, 2019), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019), and Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017). His research is inspired by the workers inquiry and focuses on labour, work, the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organising, and videogames. Jamie is on the editorial board of Notes from Below and Historical Materialism.
Beyond Hope & Passion: Finding Voice and Building Knowledge Together
Aphra Kerr & Josh Moody
Game production studies as a field of critical inquiry into the practices, conditions and logics of game production has developed through a series of waves, largely shaped by wider social and sectoral changes. The first wave of games production studies focussed on professional game companies and individual developers – plucky modders and hackers that founded companies that grew into household names. Many sought to develop professional identities (Kucklich, 2005; Kerr, 2006; Dovey and Kennedy, 2006; Consalvo, 2006; Sotamma, 2009; Dyer-Witheford and Peuter 2009; O’Donnell, 2014; Deuze, et al. 2009). The second wave of production studies focussed more on independent game makers, virtual studios, freelancers and support workers (Whitson, 2010; Guevara-Villalobos, 2012; Ruffino, 2013; Fischer and Harvey, 2013; Bulut, 2015; Parker and Jenson, 2017; Keogh, 2018). Researchers in both waves identified hackers, innovators, hopefuls, the passionate, the exploited, the excluded and the ignored (Consalvo, 2011; Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013; Kerr and Kelleher, 2015; Ozimek, 2019). Both waves have been challenging for game scholars. Many larger companies are reluctant to allow researchers in or have employment contracts that forbid speaking to researchers. Even identifying what are game companies can be challenging in what is an ill-defined sector with large numbers of part time and amateur developers.
In this paper we propose that we may be seeing a third wave of game production studies – one that is more associated with game workers ‘finding voice’ (Couldry, 2010). This wave sees some game workers coming to researchers and approaching formal worker representative organisations to gather knowledge, build community and act to collectively bargain for better working conditions. For games researchers is it an opportunity to research with game workers rather than researching about game workers (Woodcock, 2020).
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A branch of Game Workers Unite was established in Ireland in 2019 with strong links into GWU UK established the previous year. It is led by a female from an indie company with full support from her employer. In 2019 they designed and launched an online survey to provide insights into the working conditions of game workers, to identify key issues and to begin to build the GWU Ireland membership. They approached the authors of this paper to help with the analysis of the results which included responses from 223 self-identified game workers. This is approximately 10% of those employed in the Irish industry. We worked with the local branch to produce a summary report to help inform their activities and focus. This report was launched two weeks ago (Moody and Kerr, 2020).
In this presentation we reflect on the questions asked by the workers and the socio-material forms of association that are being created in Ireland. We explore what this survey tells us about game making cultures, game working and game workers in Ireland and the challenges of game making during COVID restrictions. We also reflect on what the survey tells us about game production studies more generally.
Bios Aphra Kerr is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University in Ireland, and Chair of the MA in Sociology (Internet and Society.) She has been researching the production of digital games for almost 20 years. Aphra’s books include Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Age, (Routledge, 2017) and Gamework/Gameplay. The Business and Culture of Digital Games, Sage, 2006. She was associate editor of The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. In 2020 she was nominated and accepted into the Academy of Europe and in 2016 she received a Distinguished Scholar award from the international Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA).
Josh Moody is an Irish Research Council Scholar and PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University. His research operates at the intersections of the sociology of work, labour process analysis, economic sociology and political economy. He is currently conducting research on work, commodification and the organisation of work in the digital knowledge economy through case studies of the software and the cultural and creative sectors. On a broader level, his research interests include technology, work and economic futures.
The Carbon Costs of Game Development Ben Abraham
Despite increasing focus on the material contexts of both game play and game production, (Apperley and Jayemanne 2012) very little detailed work has been carried out examining the environmental consequences of game play and game development, particularly emissions intensity attributable to the games industry. Games studies has become broadly aware of the presence of issues like e-waste and forced obsolescence (Taffel 2012; Newman 2012), human rights abuses in both the mining and hardware assembly supply chains (Shachtman 2008), and
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in the labour practices of development studios (Nguyen 2017; Legault & Weststar 2017) there has not been to date any studies of the emissions intensity of game development, with a few studies mainly concentrated on the energy use of consumers (Aslan 2020; Delforge & Horowitz 2014; Desroches et al. 2015)
In this paper I present the findings of a survey of game developers self-reported energy use and other carbon emissions data, with responses from 11 countries, and detailed energy use and emissions data from Australia, the US, Canada and the United Kingdom. Combining this data with the increasingly common inclusion of energy use and emissions data in the corporate sustainability reports of several major publicly traded game companies (Rovio, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft) this paper presents a first initial estimate of the emissions intensity of game development activities. It presents a range of emissions figures drawn from small, medium, and large companies, offering benchmarks for comparison emissions, including an estimated figure of tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions per-employee, allowing researchers to contextualize the resource intensity of the games industry. The presentation concludes with a number of potential implications for researchers and developers, and some of the encouraging trends towards strong carbon emissions reductions commitments that are emerging.
Bio Ben Abraham is (until December) a lecturer in Digital and Social Media at UTS, researching sustainability and digital games. He is currently in the final stages of writing a manuscript titled Digital Games After Climate Change for Palgrave, hopefully to be published in 2021.
Session 8: Labour
Who Rules the Working Game? Citizenship at Work in Videogame Studios Marie-Josée Legault & Johanna Weststar (presenting)
This research is motivated by our scholarly goal to understand the participatory power of contemporary project-based knowledge workers to create decent work in their sectors. We use the videogame industry (VGI) as a case study because it is an important exemplar of the future of work organization and videogame developers (VGDs) are representative of a growing cadre of highly skilled and professional workers who face precarious employment situations (Bulut, 2020). VGDs are increasingly mobilizing to resist and change the conditions of their workplaces (Weststar & Legault, 2019); however it is generally assumed that non-unionized workers have little protection because they are subject to the market regulation forces of supply and demand with only minimum standard labour laws and individual bargaining power to protect them (Fudge, 2005).
We assess the degree to which VGDs are democratic ‘citizens at work’ by benchmarking their experiences against four categories of decisive gains drawn from the historical and social-legal
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analysis of citizenship at work (Arthurs, 1967; Marshall, 1964). We rely on extensive quantitative and qualitative data from over 15 years of study of the VGI.
We find that the principles of citizenship gained in the post-WWII compromise between labour and capital cannot be transferred automatically to many contemporary work environments. This results in considerable representation and democratic gaps for project-based knowledge workers and increased employment risks, particularly among underrepresented groups such as women. We observe that workers in these environments have had to find their own ways to address their workplace claims, outside of the usual frameworks of labour institutions and employment law. We interpret their political action as a demand for change in the labour institutions that regulate work, though this latter quest is not yet clearly formulated by the workforce as a collective vision.
Bios Marie-Josée Legault
Johanna Weststar specializes in labour and employment relations. Her primary area of research is the video game industry where she is interested in issues of workplace citizenship, representation and unionization, working conditions and the labour process, project management and occupational identity. She partners with the IGDA to produce the Developer Satisfaction Survey. A selection of academic papers are open access at https://works.bepress.com/johanna_weststar/ and numerous public reports about the digital game industry can be found at http://gameqol.org.
From Crunch to Grind: Adopting a Servitization Model within Extreme Working Time Regimes Johanna Weststar & Louis-Étienne Dubois (presenting)
Working time regimes have been studied extensively as researchers seek to understand the effects of extreme working time on organizations, workers, and their families. However, as Blagoev et al. (2018: 162) state, surprisingly little is known ‘about the genesis of organizational regimes of excessive working hours’ and therefore the reasons for their persistence. Research has focused on a single problematic aspect of the time regime and interventions tackle that aspect in isolation. Yet, time regimes are hard to parse. This article examines whether and how a macro-organizational change that introduces a new production logic (servitization; Vandermerwe and Rada, 1988; Vargo and Lusch, 2007) at a project-based game development studio impacts extreme working time pressures. By examining a time regime in the midst of such a change, this article identifies the features of the work that directly and indirectly contribute to the time regime. Findings show that the extreme time regime persisted, and even worsened, despite considerable change to how the work was conducted and organized. This is because servitization added a new control imperative (Cicmil and Hodgson, 2006) that enhanced the core drivers of the existing project-based time regime.
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Bios Johanna Weststar specializes in labour and employment relations. Her primary area of research is the video game industry where she is interested in issues of workplace citizenship, representation and unionization, working conditions and the labour process, project management and occupational identity. She partners with the IGDA to produce the Developer Satisfaction Survey. A selection of academic papers are open access at https://works.bepress.com/johanna_weststar/ and numerous public reports about the digital game industry can be found at http://gameqol.org.
Louis-Étienne Dubois
Gamework On the Page: Text-Based Research Methods for Studying Game Production Cultures Amanda C. Cote & Brandon C. Harris
When studying game-making, researchers face many methodological challenges. As O’Donnell (2014) makes clear, the global video game industry has a tendency towards secrecy and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), making it difficult for researchers to gain insider access to production spaces. These structures can also decrease individual developers’ desire to speak with outsiders, fearing reprisal if they say too much about a project or potentially violate the terms of their NDA. The rise of independent development, where gameworkers maintain more control over their production, offers the potential for greater openness; however, while some segments of indie development deliberately resist the status quo (Keogh, 2015), others maintain many expectations and norms drawn from larger studios (Fisher & Harvey, 2013). Therefore, even indie developers may fall prey to the overall industry’s culture of secrecy, making game production a challenge to study.
At the same time, there is a pressing need in game studies, media industry studies, and labor studies for better insight into game development processes. As the recent controversies around Cyberpunk 2077 highlight, many areas of the game industry remain mired in problems with scheduling, quality of life, and “crunch”, despite growing attention to these issues over the past 10+ years (e.g. Consalvo, 2008; Cote & Harris, 2020; Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2006; Peticca-Harris et al., 2015; Weststar et al., 2018; Weststar & Legault, 2017). Understanding, situating and intervening in these practices therefore remains a priority, as low quality of life has both individual and systemic consequences for game-making and game makers. Overcoming the culture of secrecy to address these areas necessitates creative approaches to research.
In this presentation, we discuss our choice to use game-based texts, especially trade press and developer talks, as the object of analysis in our game labor research. Drawing on some of our key findings, we will begin by presenting several strengths of this method, such as ease of access, possibilities for holistic and longitudinal analysis, and inside perspectives on industry.
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We also examine some limitations of a textual analysis approach to media industries, such as the polished nature of publicly-facing materials, journalistic expectations of newsworthiness, and the potentially overwhelming size and scope of archived materials. This conversation will frame the types of claims we can or cannot draw from this style of analysis. We will also discuss how we plan to extend our research agenda, potentially building further connections between researchers, games journalists or analysts, and industry insiders, and will solicit audience input on other considerations relevant to investigating game-making via textual analysis methods. Overall, this presentation seeks to start building a set of best practices for inventive industry research, to help future scholars explore the structures and norms of game production more deeply.
Bios Amanda Cote is Assistant Professor of Media Studies/Game Studies at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. Her work focuses on the industry and culture of video games, with a particular emphasis on gender, representation, and issues of technological access. Her first book, Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games, was recently published by New York University Press. She has also published articles in Journal of Communication, Games and Culture, Feminist Media Studies, and edited book collections.
Brandon C. Harris’s research interests lie at the intersections of cultural, game, fan, and new communication studies. His dissertation examines how the labor of content creators and social media influencers shapes the digital platforms they operate on. Brandon’s work considers the roles that influential content creators take on amidst the platformization of cultural production.
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Non-presenting attendees
Aaron Demeter (York/Ryerson) Jennifer R Whitson (University of Waterloo) Aaron Williams (SAE Institute) Jess Rowan Marcotte (TAG Lab, Concordia Alex Chalk (York University) University) Amanda Lotz (QUT) Jini Maxwell (RMIT University) Amber Marshall (QUT) Kenzie Gordon (University of Alberta) Andrew Bailey (York University) Kevin Garvey Arieh Offman (Australian Centre for the Lisy Kane Moving Image) Matt Horrigan (Simon Fraser University) Ashwin Nagappa (QUT) Michael Dezuanni (QUT) Benjamin Nicoll (QUT) Michael McMaster (RMIT University) Ben Scholl (Simon Fraser University) Patrick Dolan (York University) Bo Ruberg (University of California) Rae Moors (University of Michigan) Caitlin Boucher (Screen Queensland) Sarah Stang (York University) candle Seb Chan (Australian Centre for the Moving Chad Toprak (Freeplay) Image) Christen Cornell (Australian Council for the Stephanie Harkin (Swinburne University) Arts) Stuart Cunningham (QUT) Dan Golding (Swinburne University) Taylor Hardwick (Swinburne University) Dan Padua (QUT) thryn henderson (University of York) Douglas Wilson (RMIT University) Tim Snowdon (RMIT University) Emma Witkowski (RMIT University) Trent Kusters (League of Geeks) Enric Granzotto Llagostera (Concordia Xiaoting Yu (QUT) University) Yu Shan (QUT) Grieg de Peuter (Wifrid Laurier University)
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