1st Edition
Independent Videogames Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics
Independent Videogames investigates the social and cultural implications of contemporary forms of independent video game development. Through a series of case studies and theoretical investigations, it evaluates the significance of such a multi-faceted phenomenon within video game and digital cultures.
A diverse team of scholars highlight the specificities of independence within the industry and the culture of digital gaming through case studies and theoretical questions. The chapters focus on labor, gender, distribution models and technologies of production to map the current state of research on independent game development. The authors also identify how the boundaries of independence are becoming opaque in the contemporary game industry – often at the cost of the claims of autonomy, freedom and emancipation that underlie the indie scene. The book ultimately imagines new and better narratives for a less exploitative and more inclusive videogame industry.
Systematically mapping the current directions of a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to define and limit, this book will be a crucial resource for scholars and students of game studies, media history, media industries and independent gaming.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
1. Introduction: After Independence
Paolo Ruffino
Part I: Cultures
2. Decoding and Recoding Game Jams and Independent Game-making Spaces for Diversity and Inclusion
Aphra Kerr
3. Queering Indie: How LGBTQ Experiences Challenge Dominant Narratives of Independent Games
Bonnie Ruberg
4. Virtually Indie: On the Characteristics of Independent Game Development for Virtual Reality Headsets
Paweł Grabarczyk
Part II: Networks
5. Network or Die? What Social Networking Analysis Can Tell Us About Indie Game Development
Pierson Browne and Jennifer Whitson
6. Strange Bedfellows: Indie Games and Academia
Celia Pearce
Part III: Techniques
7. The Conditions of Videogame Production: The Nature and Stakes of Creative Freedom in Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technicity
Patrick Crogan
8. Boutique Indie: Annapurna Interactive and Contemporary Independent Game Development
Felan Parker
9. Game Production Studies: Studio Studies Theory, Method and Practice
Casey O’Donnell
Part IV: Politics
10. Game Workers Unite: Unionization Among Independent Developers
Jamie Woodcock
11. Playing with Risk: Political-Economy, Independent Games, and the Precarity of Development in Crowded Commercial Markets
Nadav Lipkin
Part V: Local Indie Game Studies
12. Playful Peripheries: The Consolidation of Independent Game Production in Latin America
Orlando Guevara-Villalobos
13. The Melbourne Indie Game Scenes: Value Regimes in Localized Game Development
Brendan Keogh
14. Modes of Independence in the Finnish Game Development Scene
Olli Sotamaa
15. The Rebels Across the Street: IndiE3 and the Strategic Geography of Indie Game Promotion
John Vanderhoef
16. Freedom from the Industry Standard: Student Working Imaginaries and Independence in Games Higher Education
Alison Harvey
17. Afterword: The Cultural Conditions of Being Indie
Bart Simon
Index
Biography
Dr. Paolo Ruffino is lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths and MIT Press, 2018). He has co-curated, with Marco Benoît Carbone, a special issue of Games and Culture in 2017 on the work of Roger Caillois, and of GAME The Italian Journal of Game Studies on videogame subcultures in 2014. His research focuses on independent videogame development, the automation of play, and contemporary practices and technologies of gamification and quantification of the self. He is chair of DiGRA Italia and a member of British DiGRA.
