The contemporary videogame industry is popularly imagined as a homogenous site where large, international studios pour millions of publishers’ dollars into technologically advanced blockbuster experiences. The sheer amount of money these Hollywood-like games return to their investors through sales is held up in countless scholarly and journalistic articles as both arguments for the cultural legitimacy of the medium and its complicity in neoliberal capitalism. Of this straightforward imagining, the videogames most visible in broader culture are, inevitably, those with the highest budgets and the most advertising—such as the juggernaut franchises of Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto—and those online games with significant online communities such as massively-multiplayer online (MMO) games like World of Warcraft or com-petitive e-sports like League of Legends (see Taylor 2006; Taylor 2012 respectively).
Much has been written about these most visible sectors: the games they produce (Deuze et al. 2007); the labour practices they cultivate (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005); the cultures they perpetuate (Kirkpatrick 2013). However, a far more diverse range of creators, audiences, and modes of videogame production and consumption has emerged with the rise of digital distribution and a proliferation of platforms.
International corporate publishers now compete with—and draw influence from—
smaller teams or individuals that arefinding their own critical and commercial success in vibrant independent scenes. While a hobbyist, core, male-dominated “gamer”
audience continues to prioritise technological progressivism and virtuosic control, more ubiquitous platforms such as smartphones and social network sites challenge these traditional values by broadening the reach of videogames to a more diverse and casual audience that has an everyday relationship to videogames. A lower barrier of entry to the tools of videogame production, meanwhile, has seen an emergence of DIY developers from marginalised backgrounds creating and distributing experi-mental and personal“zine” games. Across this diverse network of creators, nascent critical discourses are emerging both publicly and within the academy, in tandem
with the enthusiast press, to discuss and debate the values and meanings of the videogame form.
This chapter traces an outline of this complex assemblage that is the videogame cultural industries. It explores major tensions that emerge from the intersect of these various actors to understand how the cultural value of videogames is established and judged between enjoyment and technological advancement, between accessibility and complexity, between commercial viability and artistic merit. While any one of these tensions could be (and has been) explored by entire books, this chapter is concerned with capturing the complexity of the whole. It hopes to instil an appreciation for the true breadth and heterogeneity of the videogames cultural industry beyond the blockbuster and multiplayer titles that form the visible tip of the iceberg, and will allow videogames to be better contextualised within the broader ecology of the core cultural industries.
Three sections explore the defining sites of these tensions in the contemporary videogame industry. First, the relationship between “Triple-A” and “indie” develop-ment will contrast the risk-adverse, conservative design of the blockbuster studios that, ironically, comes hand-in-hand with technological innovation, with the rise of“indie”
games that set up a fruitful antagonism with the large studios. The rise of “indie”
challenges many of the Triple-A industry’s core values, with individual developers making names for themselves by refusing to look “forward” but instead aiming to replicate a“golden age” of videogame nostalgia. Second, I turn to the parallel rise of casual games across social and mobile media, and the tension between increased nor-malisation of videogames with questionable monetisation practices such as free-to-play.
Third, I turn to the rise of hobbyist and DIY game production where genderqueer, economically disadvantaged, and non-white developers are challenging long-held, fundamental understandings of the videogame form. These creators are not primarily focused on producing economically viable products, but instead create videogames like one would create a zine, and this different approach drastically changes how videogames are imagined and designed. To conclude, I turn my attention to the rise of critical discourses in tension with traditional, consumer-orientated games journalism that has emerged in recent years alongside a maturing cultural form. Ultimately, this paper is less concerned with the impossible task of exhaustively mapping con-temporary videogames than it is in demanding an appreciation for the impossibility of that task. Researchers of the videogame cultural industries must acknowledge the complexity of the form and the interdependency of its many scenes. To appreciate
“videogames” is to appreciate a great many things.
Triple-A and indie
That most visible section of the videogame cultural industries—the studios and publish-ers pouring millions of dollars into the development and marketing of technologically spectacular franchises for home console machines—is commonly known as “Triple-A.”
As has been extensively explored by other authors (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005; Izushi and Aoyama 2006; Deuze et al. 2007; Kirkpatrick 2013), studios typically work under the oversight of a publisher (and with the publisher’s investment) to
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produce a game that the publisher will market and distribute. The game will be released on personal computers (PCs) and the consoles of the day (at present the Xbox One and Playstation 4); or, they will enter exclusive contracts with the developers of just one platform. While development studios are many, publishers are few, multinational, and hold vast sways of power over what games do and do not get developed. Often, these large publishers—such as EA, Activision, and Rockstar—
produce their own campus-sized development studios (such as EA Vancouver, or Ubisoft Montreal) or purchase ownership of independently started studios to gain exclusive rights over the labour and creative output of that studio.
Historically, videogames have always been a technologically driven medium.
Huhtamo (2005) traces a fascinating prehistory of videogames through Industrial Age moving image cultures and Kirkpatrick (2013) notes important social pressures that influenced the medium’s evolution. However, videogames have always been caught up with hacker ideologies of technological advancement and a “passion in virtuosity”
(Turkle 2005, 187) ever since Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students hacked a PDP-1 computer to run Spacewar! in 1961. The spectacle of cutting-edge technology has been persistent throughout videogames’ commercial history. Jason Wilson notes this in his study of videogame aesthetics through the 1970s and 1980s. On a flyer promoting Atari’s 1976 arcade game Night Driver, “the backlight technology, sound effects, and on-screen display are all advertised as offering a heightened form of ‘realism’ and are all foregrounded as pleasurable aspects of the game” (Wilson 2007, 12).
Afixation on the power of advanced technologies to produce “realism” remains central to the trajectory of videogame development. The myth marketed to and pervasively believed by gaming audiences is that once technology allows videogames to be“realistic” enough, players will be able to step into the virtual world and not have to think about the technology at all (Kirkpatrick 2013, 85). The significance of constantly improving technology to the quality of videogames is carefully cultivated by the Triple-A industry, as is transparently clear in the notion of console “genera-tions,” each seen as superior to their predecessors (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009, 71). Throughout 2013, as Microsoft and Sony moved to launch their new consoles, this harking of technology as caught up with quality was explicitly clear. Talking on stage at Sony’s Playstation 4 announcement event, game developer David Cage made the curious claim that“Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail of all game creators … with the Playstation 4, games have now finally reached that stage.” The promise of realism through more powerful technology is dangled like a carrot on a stick to ensure consumers regularly purchase new hardware or incrementally different titles in the same franchise (Deuze et al. 2007, 339).
This requires increasingly large teams and development cycles to produce“realistic”
games, and inevitably takes its toll on the labour of game production, as has been the subject of several journalistic investigations in recent years (McMillen 2011;
Zacny 2012). It is not rare for one game to be worked on by several geographically dis-tant studios all owned by the one publisher, or for elements of a game to be outsourced to a third party (Deuze et al. 2007, 342). As explored in depth by de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford (2005) and touched on by Deuze et al. (2007, 345), the environment of these studios becomes increasingly hostile and unsustainable to employees. With
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a systemically de-unionised workforce (Williams 2013), hours are long and overtime pay is nearly nonexistent as developers“crunch” to meet milestones. Employees are lured by the promise of a “playful” working environment to turn them into “pas-sionate pay slaves” (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005), made to believe that rather than overtime, they should be happy to be doing their “dream” job. These studios consequentially promote a fraternity culture, where employees feel like they are not working for “the man” even while corporate overlords insist they work 18-hour days with no overtime pay (de Peuter and Dyer-Witherford 2005). Such conditions, alongside gamer culture’s ongoing cultivation of a “core” adolescent male audience (Kirkpatrick 2013, 89) leads to Triple-A studios being populated by a very particular demographic: young, no dependant family, and overwhelmingly male (Deuze et al.
2007, 345). Combined, these factors lead to a homogenised cultural workforce with high turnover and low experience.
Driven by the need to return a profit, publishers become increasingly risk adverse as the amount of money spent on a single title increases. When Crystal Dynamic’s Tomb Raider(2013) sold 3.4 million copies in four weeks after its release, publisher Square Enix lamented that it had not reached its sales target (Phillips 2013). The focus shifts to making an incrementally better-looking version of what sold last time, and Triple-A games fall into narrower and narrower categories and franchises, such as the first-person shooter or the open-world driving game. “Middleware” such as game engines becomes increasingly important to streamline development cycles and, consequentially, further funnels the potentials for future games—games produced using the Unreal Engine, for instance, are constrained by what the Unreal Engine is capable of (Kirkpatrick 2013, 104). The Triple-A arm of videogames is thus dominated by games that mustfit into known thematic and mechanical genres (fantasy, sci-fi, military; first-person shooter, role-playing game, action game); must be “difficult,”
“realistic,” and “complex” in the conventional ways; must be appealing to a particular
“core” audience of young men; and must also be technologically innovative.
The contemporary indie scene—where individuals or small teams can feasibly hope to return a profit—emerges through the 2000s in response to this increasingly homogenised and corporatised product-based industry. In the introduction to a special issue of Loading journal focused on the culture of indie games, Simon notes that to talk of indie games is “not to speak only of the games themselves or of the experiences of gameplay but rather of the cultures of game development from whence they came” (Simon 2013, 2). Much as indie music and film genres emerged in response to the industrialised status-quo of mainstream production (Lipkin 2013, 10), indie game developers cultivate a persona of care-free creativity and innovation.
While there is a long and significant history of hobbyist developers and “modding”
communities (Banks and Humphreys 2008; de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005;
Anthropy 2012), the contemporary and commercially viable indie developers emerge alongside a normalisation of digital distribution channels. No longer dependent on physical stores to distribute games, indie developers take full advantage of the internet to deliver cheaper and smaller games directly to users through their own websites.
Indie games have also become a significant presence on major digital distribution storefronts such as Valve’s Steam, Microsoft’s Xbox Live, Sony’s Playstation Store and, as explored in the next section, Apple’s App Store. Such a presence reveals a
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core contention with the indie label: that its stated antagonism with Triple-A leads to an inevitably symbiotic relationship. Those games most commonly thought of as the flag-bearers of “indie,” such as Jonathan Blow’s Braid, 2D Boy’s World of Goo, and Team Meat’s Super Meat Boy, are available on the same corporate platforms as Triple-A titles. Meanwhile, Mojang’s Minecraft, while produced and developed independently, has sold tens of millions of copies and allowed the originally one-man studio to grow to such a size to be publishing other developers’ games, while still holding onto the
“indie” persona. Indie, then, is not simply every amateur developer (although many amateur developers will identify themselves as “indie”), but a carefully cultivated antagonism against the status quo of the mainstream industry.
The rise of indie studios, with their lower overhead costs, has created new genres and design directions (and resurrected old ones) outside of that central trajectory of technological upgrade culture that Triple-A publishers deem safe investments. The pixel art, sidescrolling platformers, and low-fi music of indie games are in part a delib-erate attempt to return to a “golden age” of game development (ie. the games the developer played as a kid) and in part an economic necessity as, working as individuals or in small teams, 2D games are easier to produce. These indie aesthetics, as they become normalised, reflexively influence broader aesthetic values across the industry and are inevitably coopted by the mainstream industry as a new status quo (Lipkin 2013, 15). Further, as indie developers explore new ways to fund themselves, these monetisation practices feed back into the industry. For instance, Minecraft popularised paying for “alpha” access, effectively creating a player base that both provides free testing labour and funds further development of the game, and this has been formalised through the normalisation of“beta access” to larger games, as well as Steam’s “Early Access” program. The Humble Indie Bundle, which introduced a pay-what-you-want model for a bundle of indie games, has also seen Triple-A publishers follow the same route. Crowdsourcing websites, meanwhile, such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo have seen both indie developers and Triple-A studios turn to crowd investment for productions that traditional publishers would not invest in. Through how they are developed, the atmosphere and culture they project, and through how they are dis-tributed, indie game are a significant intervening factor when considering the values and strategies of the videogame cultural industries and what they produce, existing in a symbiotic tension with Triple-A development——both opposing and entangled in the narratives and values of the Triple-A industry.
Casual and mobile games: Videogames become normal
If the rise of the indie scene is about videogames being legitimised as more than“mere”
entertainment products (Parker 2013), then the rise of casual games, as Juul notes in his preliminary but extensive study of thefield, is about videogames becoming normal (2010, 1). As social and mobile media such as Facebook and smartphones become increasingly ubiquitous in many contemporary cultures, videogame developers have access to an increasingly broad audience beyond the core “gamer” culture. Instead of targeting adolescent male audiences through certain masculine genres and performances, casual videogames attract a broader audience through more accessible style and design.
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Juul notesfive key design concerns that differentiate casual games from the tradi-tional “hardcore” games of the Triple-A industry: inoffensive fiction; usability through an intuitive or mimetic interface (such as the Wii-mote or a touchscreen); a balanced difficulty; excessive audiovisual feedback; and, significantly, interruptibility (Juul 2010, 30–55). Combined, these concerns allow casual games to be incorporated into the everyday life of people who do not have a lifetime experience of playing videogames, such as a quick game of Candy Crush Saga while checking Facebook, or a couple of stages of Angry Birds on the train. While the term“casual” immediately connotes ideas of a less committed or less serious player, and has been critiqued for obscuring the amount of labour players regularly devote to casual games (Taylor 2012, 241), the strength of the term is in its connotations of flexibility, as casual games are often played by a “body-in-waiting” (Hjorth and Richardson 2009, 29).
Just as a casual employee may still work extensive hours but on a more flexible roster, players of casual games may—and often do, as Juul’s interviews show—play games with as much commitment as players of non-casual games, but in brief moments here and there, through social network sites or mobile platforms.
Much like indie games, then, casual games often focus on rejuvenating older game genres and designs, especially the intermittent-play design of arcade games. Many casual games focus on short, point-scoring bouts, such as Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja or Wonder-land’s Stickets. Indeed, many developers of casual games do consider themselves “indie,”
as many casual game studios are similarly startups trying to design games outside the traditional publisher model. But casual games have heralded a new corporate side of games separate from but related to the traditional Triple-A industry, with large publisher/
developer houses emerging, such as Zynga. The rise of casual games as a legitimate busi-ness venture sent ripples through the games industry, as was clear from various heated discussions at the 2010 and 2011 Game Developers Conferences (GDC) in San Francisco, with many traditional developers seeing casual games as venture capitalism hiding under the thinnest veil of game design. In particular, the rise of cheap or free mobile games functioning under a “free-to-play” model led to claims such as Nintendo of America President Regie Fils-Aime dismissing mobile games as“disposable” in a GDC 2011 keynote (Kohler 2011), while at the same conference, critic and developer Ian Bogost called out Zynga’s social game model as “high fructose slot machines” and further critiqued them with a satirical Facebook game, Cow Clicker (Brown 2011). Free-to-play alters game design to, in the worse scenario, create a“pay-to-win” scenario where a game is deliberately broken until the player pays money to fix it.1 Concerns have been raised of the similarities between free-to-play games and gambling machines such as slot machines to lure players in and then ask for money, often in fake currencies to obscure how much money they are actually spending (Woodford 2013).
While these concerns are valid, they also highlight an anxiety in established game development and consumption practices towards a new form of games that does not conform to known values—casual games are neither the technologically advanced
“realism” of Triple-A games, nor the ambivalence of financial success important to indie. What is ultimately at stake in the“casualisation” of videogame cultures is an identity: what it means to be someone who plays videogames. Traditionally an out-sider identity held by geeks and hackers as a badge of honour, videogames are now mainstream and ubiquitous, played on trains by businessmen and on computers by
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parents and on airplanes by small children. There is no longer anything unique about being into videogames. However, a fascinating survey by Adrienne Shaw (2011) shows that, despite this ubiquity of videogames, very few videogame players identify as
“gamers.” Indeed, it is only those (predominately male) players of core games that identify as such. Most people who play videogames do not consider it a defining
“gamers.” Indeed, it is only those (predominately male) players of core games that identify as such. Most people who play videogames do not consider it a defining