A media industry perspective on digital games

Folie 1 von 25AP New Media and Game Studies – Utrecht, 01.04.2015

Dr. Stefan Werning (Media Studies, University of Bayreuth)

A media industry perspective on digital games.Between theory and practice(s)


Production (Studies)


Digital games in the context of production studies

• Network structures in digital gameproduction

• Functions of game jamsfor the independent games scene(Guevara-Villalobos 2011)

• Foucaultian analyses of mediaproduction– Governmentality: political economy– Disciplinary power: ‚Managing‘ guests in game

shows (Carpentier 2001)

• An ANT perspective on mediaproduction (Teurlings 2013)– Technological and economic phenomena as ‚actors‘

Guevara-Villalobos, Orlando. „Cultures of Independent Game Production: Examining the Relationship between Community andLabour.“ Think Design Play: The fifth international conference of theDigital Research Association (DIGRA). 2011. [online].

Teurlings, Jan. "Unblackboxing Production. What Media Studies Can Learn from Actor-Network Theory." After the Break. Television TheoryToday. Eds. de Valck, Marijke and Jan Teurlings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. 101-16. Print.


Digital games in the context of production studies: The ludic quality of game production

• Game production as an intrinsically playfulprocess

• The creation of Half-Life– The Cabal as a set of ‚rules of play‘

– Self-imposed constraints and‚remixing‘ challenges

– Design metrics as ‚goals‘

• Game elements withinagile software production– Innovation games (Buy a feature)

– Planning poker

Birdwell, Ken. "The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life." Gamasutra. The Art & Business of Making Games (1999). Web.


A software studies perspectiveon digital game technology

• Conceptual bias ‚embedded‘ intothe interface and workflows– Ready-made code for first-person shooters

• EXAMPLE: Asset marketplaces as‚aesthetic eco-systems‘

• EXAMPLE: RPG Maker– Fostered the differentiation and subversion of

Japanese RPGs as a genre

– Use of standardized art assets divertsattention from audiovisual detail toprocedural rhetoric

• To The Moon, Always Sometimes Monsters


A software studies perspectiveon digital game technology II

• Issues of representing sex andethnicity in customizing avatars

– Technological rationales

• Different texture layers

• Parametrized colors for skin, hair, eyes etc.

• Modular meshes

• Brushes drawn onto the texture

– Cultural rationales

• Normalization (e.g. through defaultsettings)

• Institutionalizes representationalstereotypes in the form of presets

• Suggests an ‚objectifying‘ stance

• Imposes a specific (male) gaze


A software studies perspectiveon digital game technology III

• Institutionalizing new perceptionsof older media formats (Manovich)

• Example: Wwise– Loops and triggers

– Grouping layers by function

• e.g. percussion or layered strings

– Parametrizable acoustic parameters

• Dynamic equalizing, simulated acoustic space(e.g. digitally created reverb)


‚Game pollution‘

• Abundance– Cf. digital ‚culture of plenitude‘ (Jay D. Bolter)– Caused by a multiplicity of production tools

and principles like content reuse

• Describes both the ‚symptom‘ andthe corresponding reaction– Symptom

• Produces cognitive overload and stress• Leads to a lower overall usage intensity• Paradox of Choice (Schwartz, 2004)

– Reaction• ‚Analytical‘ playing style• Buying/browsing rather than playing• Partially ‚automating‘ the reception

– Shutting out ‚noise‘

• Implications– Design challenge for ‚serious games‘

Schwartz, Barry. "The paradox of choice: Why less is more." New York: Ecco(2004).


Distribution


Transitioning from goods to services

• Epistemic shift– Fostered by streaming services, real-time

metrics and upgrades/DLC

– Encourages distinct usage practices

• Comparable to perceptions ofearly film ‚as a service‘– Before standardization through the MPPC

• Comparable to Second Screen effects on television series– Live discussions on Twitter

Thompson, Clive. "How Social Media Turns Creative Pursuits into ‘Live’ Performances." Wired Magazine 2012: 35. Print.


Digital games in the context of distribution studies: Games as ‚platforms‘

• Digital games are increasinglyturned into socio-technicalsystems– Cf. (Niederer/Van Dijck 2010)– E.g. tie-in apps or Youtube uploads from

PlayStation3 games

• Paratextual activity– Games become ‚eco-systems‘ within the

digital attention economy (Herbert A. Simon)

– ‚Let‘s play‘ videos, walk-throughs, parodies

• Games increasingly act as highlyspecific social networks– Accelerate the fragmentation and functional

differentiation of social networks

Niederer, Sabine and José van Dijck. "Wisdom of the Crowd or Technicity ofContent? Wikipedia as a Sociotechnical System." New Media & Society 12.8 (2010): 1368-87. Print.


Distribution as a mediatized process: Crowdfunding

• Set between production, distribution and monetization

• Performativity in Kickstarter campaigns

• Kickstarter campaigns asnarratives– Exposition, rising action, climax,

denouement

– Require emplotment (White 1992) of theproduction process• Self-Narrativization and self-historicization

• Create a recognizable and retellable story

White, Hayden. "Historical emplotment and the problem of truth." Probingthe limits of representation 38 (1992).


Distribution as a mediatized process: Remediation

• Remediating distributionformats

• Special edition releases– Acknowledges aesthetic and historical

relevance: cf. the Criterion collection

– ‚Director‘s cut‘

– Bonus features on DVDs

Distelmeyer, Jan. "Spielräume. Videospiele, Kino Und Die Intermediale Architektur Der Film-Dvd." Spielformen Im Spielfilm. Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne. Eds. Leschke, Rainer and Jochen Venus. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007. 389-416. Print.


Distribution as a mediatized process: Game bundles

• Bundles epistemically link games to music, films and e-books

• Epistemic connection to cereal„fun packs“ – Cf. (Bogost 2012)

– Marks the games as a „special treat [...] to be repeated only occasionally“

• Reenact a form of ‘patronage’– Alters the consumer-producer relation

– Consumers identify with the producer’s perspectiveBogost, Ian. "What Is a Game Bundle?" Gamasutra. The Art & Business of Making

Games (2012). Web.


ACulturally Comparative

Perspective


Bootlegs as a transitional phenomenon

• Distinct places, practices and‚cultural‘ specificities– Chinese bootleg stores in South Africa

– „There was some official PAL support, but it was negligible and the cool kids imported”

• Symbiosis between formal and‚informal‘ ecomies– Create a sustainable and visible community

• Encourage the rise of regional journals, eventsand eventually developer networks

– Informal Economies as transitory or ‚thirdspaces‘

http://gameological.com/2013/02/the-pirate-hacks-of-africa/

http://gameological.com/2013/02/the-pirate-hacks-of-africa/


Technology in a critical, culturally comparativeperspective on digital games

• Transnational distributionreaccentuates the questionof cultural specificity

• Technological and economicconstraints on expressingculture in video games

• Under Ash (Dar al-Fikr, 2001)– Cf. (Galloway 2004)

– Unforgiving gameplay allegedly‚signifies‘ social realism

Galloway, Alexander R. "Social Realism in Gaming." Game Studies. The International Journal of Computer Game Research 4.1 (2004). Print.


Playfulness in game production

• Player typologies(Tuunanen and Hamari, 2012)– Killer, Achiever, Explorer, Socializer (Bartle)

• Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta– The ‚achiever‘ mentality

• One of the first games for the PlayStation 3 developed using Unity 3D

• Pushing technical and administrative boundaries

• Demonstrating competitiveness in terms oftechnological and design ‚standards‘

– The ‚explorer‘ mentality• Mapping out and adapting the Uncharted

franchise

• Industrial auteur theory – Cf. (Caldwell 2008) on film production– Implies a sense of ‘agency’

Tuunanen, Janne, and Juho Hamari. "Meta-synthesis of player typologies." Proceedings of Nordic Digra 2012 Conference: Games in Culture and Society, Tampere, Finland. 2012.

Caldwell, John Thornton. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.


Performativity in transcultural game production

• Technological appropriation– Unlicensed use of the CryEngine for

Special Force 2 by the Hezbollah

– Early Indian filmmakers using British equipment to re-tell their own historyand mythology

• ‘Activist’ potential ofcrowdfunding campaigns– Kickstarter campaign for 1979

Revolution

• "I think everybody has a revolutionaryinside them...”

• Developer was marked as a spy in Iran

• Pledge tiers use the same semantics


‚New media‘ formats as a form of cultural expression

• Cultural self-assertion– Raja Harishchandra (1913)

– Ashoka (2003, discontinued)

• Political and culturalinstrumentalization– US-Army funding program for ‚patriotic‘

movies such as Pearl Harbor

– Special Force (2003)

– Egypt Game Jam


Outlook


A historically comparative perspectiveon the digital games industry

• Interplay between academics, reflective practitioners and an increasingly self-conscious press

• Exchange of metaphors– Film

• »Sculpture in motion« (Vachel Lindsay, author)• »Music of light« (Abel Gance, director)• »Painting in movement« (Leopold Survage, painter)• »Architecture in movement« (Élie Faure, art

historian)

– Games• „Chemistry of game design“ (Daniel Cook)• „Narrative architecture“ (Henry Jenkins)• „Petri nets“ (Natkin/Vega)

• Passage (2007) and Gravitation (2008) as ‚Kuleshov experiments‘ for games?


Independent game production as‚collective simulation‘

• Simulation through feedback loops– Production– Feedback – Contextualization– Remaking

• Defining through constant variation– Sophie Houlden, The Linear RPG– Modding and genre mash-ups

• Dependent on production anddistribution modalities– Archiving and forking (Git Hub)– Online communities (Gamejolt)– Game jams used for making sense of new

technologies such as Oculus Rift and the Ouya


Media industry awareness

• Economic differentiation, particularlywithin the digital games industry– Users increasingly interpret and ‚understand‘ digital

media content as a ‚product‘

• In a second step, some users alreadypractically apply that knowledge– Theorycrafting

– Selling user-generated content

• ‚Economic literacy‘ trickles down intonew media use in general


Outlook: Economic literacy

• Runs across several categories of„digital literacies“– Language-based– Information-based– Connections-based– (Re-)design-based

• Remaking, remixing

• Examples– Improvised economies in early MMORPGs– Economic game design (F2P, DLC etc.)– Immaterial economies such as gift

economies

• ‘Economic literacy’– Applies both to ‘reading’ and ‘writing’– Using marketplace dynamics as ‚rule

systems‘ to address real-world problems

Hockly, Nicky. "Digital literacies." ELT journal 66.1 (2012): 108-112.

Dobson, Teresa, and John Willinsky. "Digital literacy." The Cambridge handbook of literacy (2009): 286-312.

A media industry perspective on digital games

Education

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