Data capital in the games industry

Abstract

As games collect, collate and correlate every more intricate data on players, developers and the other companies and service providers they depend upon are unsure of how to balance these new big data needs with data security and user privacy. As with other reporting on big data—both critical and euphoric—it is difficult to disentangle the often hyperbolic media and academic discourse from the everyday, pragmatic realities of how companies actually use data in their everyday work. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of game developers in Montreal, Canada, this paper illustrates the human aspect of informational practice, providing a description of what of big data practice looks like in the trenches of digital media production. To provide context, I first document the rise of data-driven design in the game industry, the resulting shifts in the forms and shape of games being made, and the impact that data-driven design has on the creative autonomy of new media workers. I then focus on independent game developers and their strategic adoption of data analytics. Intriguingly, these metrics practices are deployed in ways that place less emphasis on using data analytics to fine-tune game mechanics or learn about player communities, and more on signalling measurable success in culture industries to the press, player communities, and funding agencies. Drawing from Bourdieu, I show how independent developers selectively leverage big data discourses to undergo a stepped series of capital conversions, from social to cultural to economic to symbolic. Developers that deploy this empirical language, however, are very aware of the gaps and failures of analytics and are critical of the role of analytics in game-making, thus illustrating the ways surveillant technologies are resisted, re-appropriated, and re-formed by front-line software developers.