Researching Game-making Skills, cultures, and politics

Researching Game-making Skills, cultures, and politics

Researching Game-making Skills, cultures, and politics

Brendan Keogh

Abstract

“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?”.

Reference

Keogh, B. (2020). Researching Game-making Skills, cultures, and politics.  https://eprints.qut.edu.au/207132/

Keywords

Videogame, emerging, workshop