Resisting the perpetual update: Struggles against protocological power in video games

Švelch, Jan

doi:10.1177/1461444819828987

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Given the current service nature of games, they run constantly online and are frequently updated (Sotamaa & Karppi, 2010;Švelch, 2019). Therefore, developers easily accrue responsibilities that extend beyond the traditional working hours spent at the studio.…”

Section: Working Culture Within the Game Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying Game Development Cultures

Sotamaa

2021

Games and Culture

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By analyzing and contextualizing different aspects of the Finnish game development scene, this article provides concrete examples of why we need cultural studies of game development and how game development cultures can be studied. The article follows a three-layer approach, first exploring some of the historical and political developments that have shaped forms of local game production. Second, a focus is placed on working cultures within the industry and attitudes toward crunch time, work–life balance, and workplace regulation. Third, everyday strategies of organizing creative work are analyzed to better understand game studio cultures. The lessons from this empirical study directly contribute to the larger scholarly discussions around game production and creative labor.

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Section: Working Culture Within the Game Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying Game Development Cultures

Sotamaa

2021

Games and Culture

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“…More profoundly though, through updates such as new character releases or game balance changes (often called ‘patches’) that are extremely common in LoL , there is consistent new content for co-creative actors such as live streamers, user-generated content producers and esports professionals to utilise. Although the release of patches can cause controversy for players (Švelch, 2019), this constant development is integral to maintaining a game co-creative network and by extension, its affective monetisation.…”

Section: Gift Of a Free And ‘Fair’ Gamementioning

confidence: 99%

Gaming the gift: The affective economy of League of Legends ‘fair’ free-to-play model

Jarrett

2021

Journal of Consumer Culture

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With its release in late 2009, League of Legends (Riot Games) has influenced the game industry in several profound ways. Known for its vast popularity and its pivotal role in pioneering live streaming and electronic sports, League of Legends is also noteworthy for its model of ‘fair’ free-to-play. Described by Riot Games and many industry professionals as ‘fair’ due to its lack of any ‘pay-to-win’ content ( Graft, 2013 ; Nutt, 2014 ), this model of free-to-play has gone on to influence a paradigmatic shift towards ‘games as a service’. In this study, the model of ‘fair’ free-to-play is critically framed as a lucrative affective economy involving reciprocal gift exchanges between players and commercial games developers. Drawing on 49 qualitative Reddit responses from players who buy in-game skins, this study positions the microtransactions of League of Legends as a notable example of affective economics that is bound up in reciprocal forms of commercial exchange. Framing this hybrid model of co-creative relations alongside examples from game, fan and Internet studies, it is the critical aim of this study to frame the microtransactions of League of Legends as an instance of affective valorisation. Paralleling the affective economics of various digital platforms, it is the view of this study that microtransactions in games should be considered as part of the same political economy of the Internet.

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“…As a result, ex post optimization came to complement ex ante strategies as it allowed developers to provide technological and engagement optimization via remote updates, patches, or hotfixes after a disc-based game release. 46 Additionally, digital distribution provided game publishers with novel business models that offered an unprecedented level of granularity in terms of economic optimization. Game publishers, driven by a clear business rationale, started to experiment heavily with new commodity forms, such as downloadable content containing additional modules with maps, worlds, and/or levels.…”

Section: Games: From Ex Ante To Ex Post Game Optimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engineering culture: logics of optimization in music, games, and apps

Morris

Prey

Nieborg

2021

Review of Communication

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This article investigates the ways content producers, marketers, and other promotional stakeholders work to optimize cultural goods and services for platform-dependent production, distribution, and monetization. We are particularly interested in how content creators find novel ways to work within, around, and even against platform politics and policies by manipulating algorithms, business models, and guidelines, or otherwise readying their content for optimal circulation on multiple platforms. Through comparative cases of music, games, and apps that draw on trade press and industry discourse, institutional and financial analysis, and select interviews with musicians, we consider various forms of, and strategies for, what we call cultural optimization. We draw on these instances to better understand the similarities and differences in the optimization of cultural content and metadata for economic or cultural gains. We hope our comparative approach reveals different conceptions of the term optimization, and that this term-in all its digital, financial, and cybernetic connotations-might prompt new ways of thinking about the interactions between content, (meta)data, platforms, and culture that have long shaped the circulation of cultural goods.

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Resisting the perpetual update: Struggles against protocological power in video games

Cited by 19 publications

References 41 publications

Studying Game Development Cultures

Studying Game Development Cultures

Gaming the gift: The affective economy of League of Legends ‘fair’ free-to-play model

Engineering culture: logics of optimization in music, games, and apps

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