The Missing Producer: Rethinking indie cultural production in terms of entrepreneurship, relational labour, and sustainability

Abstract

This article draws on over 60 interviews and 120 surveys with indie game developers to illustrate relational labour and entrepreneurship practices in cultural industries and their relationship to 'good work'. We first outline the changing organization of games work, the shift towards so-called indie production, and the associated rejection of creatively constrained, hierarchically managed production models. In the move towards small-scale games making, indies jettisoned producers because producers represented industry modes of work, values and creative constraints. But indies are now struggling to manage production processes without producers. We use developer narratives to highlight how this 'missing producer' work is redistributed in the form of cultural entrepreneurship, cultural intermediation and relational labour. This relational labour simultaneously supports and undermines sustainable production practices, as developers take on impossible workloads associated with networking and connecting with others. We next illustrate how the inherent valorization of growth and expansion in cultural entrepreneurship discourses may force developers

The Cultural Field of Video Game Production in Australia

“…Rather than the specialist nature of industrialized videogame production, in these small (and often overlapping and fluid) teams, individuals take on a wide-reaching and ambiguous range of creative and business responsibilities that do not easily fit within the accepted categories provided by the field’s dominant industrial dispositions. This echoes findings by Whitson et al (2018) among Canadian indie development teams that often forgo hiring an explicit producer to instead distribute (unevenly) the producer responsibilities across the existing team. In small teams, individual creators take on more of the responsibilities, cost, and risk of production.…”

“…In their own research, Whitson, Simon, and Parker (2018) find that independent Canadian gamemakers "increasingly leverage techniques of entrepreneurship without sharing its end goals" (p. 6). While on the surface many independent videogame makers look like-and publicly adapt the language of-tech startups and entrepreneurs, their self-stated end goals as cultural producers are typically less defined in terms of "growing a studio in scale or profit" and more "with the simple capacity to 'keep on keeping on'" (p. 7).…”

“…8–9). At a time where the realities and variances of gamework in various contexts is coming under closer scrutiny (Crogan, 2018; Whitson, Simon, & Parker, 2018), just how gamework is positioned discursively (as cultural work, as software development, as entrepreneurism) has tangible ramifications on government funding models, game development education curriculums, and the canonization or marginalization of different genres and communities. This article thus follows Banks’s (2007, p. 8) call for more empirically grounded investigations into the lives of cultural workers by demonstrating the contexts and identities of the broader range of videogame makers that constitute the videogame field, of which the videogame industry is but a dominant subset.…”

“…In Global Games , Kerr (2017) provides an extensive analysis of the political economy of the global games industry and demonstrates how this “global” videogame industry is intrinsically and intimately trans-local , arguing that to comprehend global videogame production is to understand videogame production in specific local contexts and local-to-local interactions (p. 201). Other researchers have been applying this local lens in a range of contexts such as Canada (Joseph, 2013; Whitson et al, 2018), the Nordic countries (Jørgensen, Sandqvist, & Sotamaa, 2017), and (historical) Czechoslovakia (Švelch, 2018). Australia is an ideal case study through which to further develop these understandings of localized videogame making activity.…”

Autonomy, Integration, and the Work of Cultural Intermediation in Indie Games

“…They perform emotional and care work in order to ensure that projects go through and teams stay together, performing invisible, gendered tasks that fall outside of the game development "triangle" of designercoder-artist and can go neglected on smaller indie teams. 35 This side of their work causes some friction, because it complicates the notion that intermediaries must maintain a degree of autonomy and not become too deeply involved-after all, they generally work with many different teams and projects at the same time. In conversations with co-working space coordinator Tracey, she remarks that while she is not a member of any one team, and at the end of the day is not responsible for any decisions, she performs a great deal of work and care to aid these studios.…”