IR9, day 1, 3:30pm: Video game cultures, innovation, and user generated content

From Copenhagen, Oct 16

Hector Postigo

Background:
Fan studies/Political economy
Terranova and social factory (working for nothing)/Jenkins and participatory culture (everyone media rich)

Picking at social factory:
Are theories of post-industrial labor enough for understanding what work means to co-producers?
There is in fact agency, etc. and the actors aren’t just dupes for the cog machine.

Two examples:

  1. GI Joe mod as resistance
    idea that love of the game and creation = rights
    equate the mod with DeCSSS makes the mod no longer a game but a symbol of resistance
  2. AOL volunteering as passionate labor with intrinsic rewards
    15k people volunteering
    access to gui to create content, etc.

These larger theories can’t get at specific people’s voices nor cover what happens when work becomes not work anymore.

Olli Sotamaa
Democratizing the console environment?
www.uta.fi/hyper

Do the XNA and WiiWare actually democratize? Not really. They more just extend the oligopoly.

Modding is more democratizing.
“casual modding” includes LitteBigPlanet, etc.

MyBuzz (website or PS3? to create quiz games).

Julian Kucklich
Collusion: Mapping connections between games and users
cheating = de-lodology
Titiana Terranova

Within gamespace, some moves are possible and some impossible for specific people. This goes hand in hand with labor concept.

[Mark]
I find it funny that Julian really wants to do a roundtable chat but he is following the lecture format. He says that he doesn’t want to do slideshows and he keeps saying “we’re talking about…” but yet he still just lectures. Too much stuff to cover in too little time. 🙁
[/Mark]

Gaming capital (not cultural capital): capitalizing play, bending the structure, commodifying gamespace

distribution of risk from center of games to periphery

the logic of play is infused by the logic of gain and more and more logic of risk

Aphra Kerr – NUI Maynooth, Sociology
Outsourcing risk

Discourse: Rise of open innovation, etc.
Reality: Distributed productions and offshoring, Accumulation by disposession

Not much stuff going on in Irish gaming market. Middleware, underbidding licensed stuff, or distributed original production.

Three trends: disintermediation (online distribution), distributed production, ownership and policing of IP

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