Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in videogame culture

Abstract

This article examines the complex relation of commodity and commons regimes in video and computer game culture. Digital play is today both a multibillion business and the site of numerous ‘do it yourself’ practices of production and reproduction, ranging from warez networks and abandonware archives through ‘modding’ (game modification) and machinima-making to the player-created content of massively multiplayer online games. Such practices are variously symbiotic with and antagonistic to commercial gaming. They are the occasion of extraordinary cooperative arrangements between game developers and players, and of fierce disputes over intellectual property. In both cases, video and computer games reveal the subversion of ‘unidimensional’ media institutions, positing sharp distinction between producers and consumers, by an emergent ‘multidimensionality’ of new media in which these roles are deeply confounded.