1st Edition

Global Games Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Era

By Aphra Kerr Copyright 2017
    240 Pages
    by Routledge

    240 Pages
    by Routledge

    In the last decade our mobile phones have been infiltrated by angry birds, our computers by leagues of legends and our social networks by pleas for help down on the farm. As digital games have become networked, mobile and casual they have become a pervasive cultural form. Based on original empirical work, including interviews with workers, virtual ethnographies in online games and analysis of industry related documents, Global Games provides a political, economic and sociological analysis of the growth and restructuring of the digital games industry over the past decade. Situating the games industry as both cultural and creative and examining the relative growth of console, PC, online and mobile, Aphra Kerr analyses the core production logics in the industry, and the expansion of circulation processes as game services have developed. In an industry dominated by North American and Japanese companies, Kerr explores the recent success of companies from China and Europe, and the emergent spatial politics as countries, cities, companies and communities compete to reshape digital games in the networked age.

    1. Introduction 

    2. Going Global – The Value, Structure and Geography of the Digital Games Industry 

    3. Production – Changing Production Logics, Organisations and Work/ers

      4. Circulation – Monitoring, Measuring and Adapting to Transnational Markets

        5. Going Local – Space, Place and Policy for Global Games Production

        6. Conclusion

        Biography

        Dr. Aphra Kerr is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University in Ireland. She is the author of The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamewor and Gameplay (2006) and she was associate editor of The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society (2015).

        "Aphra Kerr is a leading expert of game industry studies, with rare global vision, encompassing all important market areas. Global Games is the most comprehensive and accessible summary of games’ ecosystems in the networked era. This work is invaluable for everyone who wants to understand how games are financed, developed, distributed and regulated in different parts of the world today." -Frans Mäyrä, Professor, Head of the Game Research Lab, University of Tampere, Finland

        "Global Games offers the most comprehensive and theoretically sophisticate research on the impact of corporation activities in the global game industry. It intelligently maps out wide-range factors that shape today’s global gaming scene. Global Games is a timely groundbreaking scholarly work and a must to readers in the field of game studies. "-Peichi Chung, Assistant Professor of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong