Playing Nature

Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years after Games of Empire

“…Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. This is because existing work has highlighted the inequities of the global game labour market (Kerr, 2017; Ozimek, 2019) now increasingly challenged by unionization, the industry’s contribution to the consolidation of corporate interests (Kerr, 2017) including through the emergence of platforms that turn players into workers and play data into commodities (Joseph, 2017; Whitson, 2019), the commodification and standardization of cultural representation (De Wildt, 2020), the revitalization of white ethnonationalism in game culture (Ismangil, 2019; Jong, 2020), the mutually beneficial but exploitative relation between higher educational institutions and the games industry (Harvey, 2019), and the extension of new forms of colonialism through globalized supply chains and platforms (López López, de Wildt, & Moodie, 2019; Nieborg, Young & Joseph 2020) and the ecological deprivation brought about by the industry’s growth (Chang, 2019; Nguyen, 2017). But it is not only the industry which manifests problematic tendencies but also the discipline of game studies itself, which has tended to privilege certain experiences and viewpoints, notably white, male North American ones (Butt, de Wildt, Kowert, & Sandovar, 2018), and marginalized participation by those who are not in permanent academic employment and in a position to pay large conference fees.…”