Digital Game Industry Research Articles

Aspects of Independent Game Production

Recent years have witnessed independent game production rise to a prominent position in the digital game industry. Be it by the fresh, innovative take it brought to the scene or by its rebellious attitude towards what is perceived as mainstream, the term “indie game” has become somewhat of a buzzword. The following study displays a series of findings of research fieldwork aiming to advance the study of indie game development by investigating organizational and managerial practices commonly adopted by these developers. Relying on semi-structured interviews conducted with lead developers of seven Brazilian indie game firms, the connections, similarities, and differences among these developers’ firm structure and project management practices and those of the larger game industry is explored, utilizing the lenses of scope, organization, time, cost, and quality management as a starting point. Given the growing and significant relevance of the game industry as a whole, this empirical study offers pragmatic data on the still-niche research topic of indie games.

Digital games and language teaching and learning

AbstractThe digital gaming industry has captured the public's attention worldwide and in the United States alone, the video game industry is predicted to increase by 30% from 2010 to 2019, reaching $19.6 billion in revenue (Takahashi, 2015, n.p.). Not surprisingly, digital gameplay is also rapidly expanding in educational domains. Although researchers have often cautioned that digital games are not a panacea or magic bullet, for the past decade educators have been exploring the inherent complexities and benefits of digital gaming and the significant opportunities they provide for effective, meaningful learning across disciplines (Caillois, 1961; Gee, 2007; McGonigal, 2013; Squire, 2009). World language learning and teaching have followed suit. This piece provides a brief exploration of the use of digital games in the language learning context and offers three ideas for future work in this area: (1) increased access to community‐based games, (2) meaningful incorporation of virtual reality, and (3) increased access to commercial games.

The situation and importance of game interface design education in Turkey and a lesson proposal

Digital gaming industry has been an entertainment area that, since the mid 20th century, has come into prominence and distinguished itself in the game industry. Digital games have come a long way and reached large numbers of users since the time they got into the market. As for the digital game industry, the education of game design, along with the game production, is given high importance especially in USA and Europe. In these countries, game interface design with regards to programming and aesthetically designing is given place in the bachelor and master’s degree education. It can be said that, in Turkey, the number of researches in this field, lessons and game companies has been increasing in recent years. However, it’s clear that as a country, we have to come into prominence more in the international game field. As the necessity of developing more appealing, qualified and unique game interfaces is known, game companies are to act responsibly during the game interface design process. In terms of the creation of scenes, characters, environments, animations and the usage of the game engines, more professional tools and techniques are used and more original game designs are pursued nowadays. With regard to this, it’s clear that the need for qualified graphic designers to design aesthetically successful game interfaces has been increasing and will continue to. It’s seen that game design lessons have started to be given at bachelor and master’s degree programs at Universities in Turkey. Yet, the lessons are mostly on game programming at departments such as computer engineering. Game interface design lessons, on the other hand, are given at certain universities. In this study, the proposal of a game interface design lesson that can take place in the curriculum of Visual Communication Design or Graphic Departments of Fine Arts Faculties at Universities in Turkey is examined.
 Keywords: Game interface design education, graphic design education, game design, curricula.

Learning to Play Soccer: Lessons on Meta-cognition from Video Game Design

ABSTRACTOver the past decade, there has been ongoing debate relating to the use of suitable pedagogical approaches for designing learning environments to develop skillful games players. There has, however, been little consideration of the “digital age of learning” and the global success of the digital video game industry. Using the educational work of James Gee, this article attempts to rationalize how a “digital video games approach” differs from other learner-centered pedagogies currently employed for teaching and coaching games. Examination of the literature suggests that the learning gains from Teaching Games for Understanding and the Constraints Led Approach ignore the meta-cognitive dimension of learning how to play games—surely an important consideration for long-term development. Accordingly, by drawing on experiences from digital video game design, we examine how games practitioners might utilize such an approach for meta-cognition in coaching or teaching practice to stimulate player learning.

Economic cost–benefit analysis of the addictive digital game industry

ABSTRACTThis study attempts to estimate the economic costs and benefits of the addictive digital game industry. Addiction to digital games induces economic costs such as increase in crime, facilities investments for curbing addiction, increase in counselling costs and other welfare losses. As a case study, we investigate the digital game industry in South Korea which is known to have one of the highest rates of game addiction. According to our calculations, the annual cost of game addiction is estimated to be approximately $3.5B while the annual benefit is approximately $24.3B ($3.7B for addicted user market). The proportion of the total costs to total benefits from the game industry is an alarming 14% (95% for addicted user market). We offer some policy recommendations.

Ambidextrous Innovation and Game Market Fit Performance: Feedback from Game Testers

ABSTRACTThe dynamics of the market pose a challenge for the digital game industry. Game development firms must develop innovative games to satisfy game players’ ever-changing needs and sustain a suitable product/market fit. To realize such innovation, developers tend to adopt an ambidextrous approach that includes exploratory and exploitative activities to develop games. In addition, game development teams must rely on feedback from game testers to enhance development and meet game players’ needs. However, the effect of feedback on innovation is subject to debate. Some studies have proposed that feedback has potentially negative effects on creativity. Given the prevalence of ambidextrous innovation and the utilization of feedback from game testers, no study to date has investigated the effects of feedback on game development quality. A survey of 119 paired game producers and developers revealed that “feedback timing” from game testers positively enhances the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and a game’s final development performance, whereas “feedback specificity” impairs the effectiveness of ambidextrous innovation. This paper discusses the implications of this study.

From value chains to technological platforms: The effects of crowdfunding in the digital game industry

This study contributes to understanding the effects of crowdfunding on the value creation process in the digital game industry. Specifically, it integrates the value chain logic with the platform logic to examine collaborative value creation enabled by opening up the business models of game developers to the crowd. Through a multiple case design this research shows that the benefit of using crowdfunding goes well beyond fundraising. As an implementation of open innovation, crowdfunding unifies the channels that bring capital, technology and market knowledge from the crowd into the game. This finding leads to the exploration of a new complex system of interactions between game developers and value chain stakeholders, and invokes the analysis of crowdfunding as a form of technological platform to identify and analyze new types of collaboration and competition. This research limits its findings to the effects of reward-based crowdfunding. Other forms of crowdfunding require further investigations. The paper also aims to help practitioners understand how crowdfunding is transforming the game industry.

It’s Game Time: Speed, Acceleration, and The Digital Sports Game

This essay takes up the relationship between sport and time through the lens of the digital sports game. As the digital sports game industry has aspired to develop increasingly accurate simulations of professional sport, it has confronted the temporality regimes inherent in real world sport in a variety of different ways. As much as the digital sports game continues to simulate the digital athlete’s relation to time within individual contests with an increasing fidelity, the genre’s relationship to time has also been extended to simulating the athlete’s virtual career. The essay considers the time-sport relation through a ludological analysis of two recent digital sports games: the American football simulation, Madden NFL’17 and the baseball simulation, MLB The Show’16. As different as these sports might be in their construction of time, these sports games share similarities with respect to their treatment of time for the digital athlete and for the player’s time.Drawing on social theorist, John Tomlinson, and his notion of “the culture of speed” and its preoccupation with immediacy, the essay takes up ways in which these games position players with respect to accelerated time and considers the potential consequences of this acceleration for how time is perceived and experienced in the consumption of other forms of mediated sport.

Live Life to the Power of PS2: Locating the Digital Games Industry in the New Media Environment

The digital games industry is a global entertainment business stretching from Tokyo to San Francisco to London. In May each year, game developers from around the world meet in Los Angeles to pitch their ideas to publishers, sneak a preview of other games and do licensing deals with hardware companies and Hollywood studios. The show has much in common with Melia and Cannes: it has all the glitz, the hype and the stars. The main difference is that the stars are non-human, the digital game producers are relatively unknown and this form of popular culture has been largely ignored by established university media programmes and media researchers.

Steam dünyası: dijital oyun bloglarına yönelik bir değerlendirme

The virtual world has a presence in the business of the emergence of a presence in the global market of Internet network, particularly with Expansion of Web 2.0 technologies and user-generated content has been created by the transformation into a need. Once all content has been produced in the traditional context of digitalisation and virtual characters created by the presence of people in this virtual world, with virtual exchanges are continuing and satisfaction of virtual needs. Experienced all the changes as a result of businesses also they are conducting themselves in the virtual world and the assets they move to the virtual world. Corporate blogs are also involved in the formation of all these; digital public relations and digital advertising stand. Corporate announce their names are businesses that operate in the virtual world through blogs, by providing awareness and create brand awareness are called to their consumers. This research examines that the digital games which are also active in the virtual world in the digital games industry within Turkey and in the Steam digital game most commonly played on the blog pages of the Steam Community, Spy, based on the data analyzed. Accordingly, discussed twenty digital game blog page, under uses of bloggers and the language, update content, interactivity, ease of use and connectivity categories have been examined in the context of blog quality index. Keywords: Digital games, Blogs, Corporate blogs, Steam community

A Digital Game Maturity Model (DGMM)

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces artistic, software engineering, management, and business disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of important dimensions of digital game development methodology. Game development is considered as one of the most complex tasks in software engineering. The increased popularity of digital games, the challenges faced by game development organizations in developing quality games, and high competition in the digital game industry demand a game development maturity assessment. Consequently, this study presents a Digital Game Maturity Model to evaluate the current development methodology in an organization. The framework of this model consists of assessment questionnaires, a performance scale, and a rating method. The main goal of the questionnaires is to collect information about current processes and practices. In general, this research contributes towards formulating a comprehensive and unified strategy for game development maturity evaluation. Two case studies were conducted and their assessment results reported. These demonstrate the level of maturity of current development practices in two organizations.

Paving the way for new regional industrial paths: actors and modes of change in Scania’s games industry

ABSTRACTRecent scholarly work has enhanced our understanding of how new path development activities are enabled or constrained by ‘regional environments’, made up of pre-existing industrial structures, knowledge organizations, support structures and institutional configurations. This paper moves beyond overly static views on regional environments. We develop a dynamic perspective by analysing conceptually and empirically how a constraining environment can be transformed into one that enables the development of new growth paths. The paper offers a typology of various modes of change, including layering, adaptation and novel application that are used by key actors to ‘manipulate’ the regional support structures to facilitate new regional industrial path development. The conceptual framework is applied to a case study of the digital games industry in the region of Scania, southern Sweden. Our findings suggest that the creation of a more enabling environment for the growth of the digital games industry has been the outcome of multi-scalar processes and combinations of various modes of change employed by a few key individuals operating in the newly emerging path.

A Risky Business? The Role of Incentives and Runaway Production in Securing a Screen Industries Production Base in Scotland

A Risky Business? The Role of Incentives and Runaway Production in Securing a Screen Industries Production Base in Scotland

A Simulation of Consumer-side Multihoming of Original and Derivative Digital Games: Evidence from Japan

This study examines the consumer-side multihoming among original and derivative digital games are developed for different platforms such as arcade game cabinets and video game consoles, both of which are popular with consumers in the Japanese market. To do this, the system dynamics model accounts for arcade game, console game, and multihoming users, and the effects of advertising and word-of-mouth is proposed. After the validation of model using a single case study, the business policies implementation by varying the release dates of a console game (derivative content) are simulated and the fluctuating patterns of arcade game and console game sales, the multihoming ratios are examined. The simulation results indicate that the multihoming user may be a preferred customer who pays more usage fees for the original content, moreover, the multihoming user may pay usage fees for the derivative content or purchase it, rather than single homing user. This study suggests various hypotheses regarding consumer-side original and derivative content-level multihoming together with options for business scenarios within the digital game industry, which would develop the insights on the diversity of a set of contents and the interfaces, and how they form the pseudo-ecosystems and create the values by the interactions. strategic management of consumer-side multihoming. This paper first presents the most significant aspects of prior research concerning multihoming for console games and then indicates the concept of consumer-side content-level multihoming (consumer purchases and the simultaneous use of both original and derivative content used on different platforms). Next, a calculation model of the consumer-level multihoming ratio (the percentage of all users who are multihoming users) and the consumer-side multihoming ratio at the content level are derived from a single case study. The original content of the case study is represented by a trading card arcade game, and the derivative content is represented by a console game with card reader. A sensitivity analysis is conducted employing a changing release date for the console game, the multihoming ratios of the original and derivative content, and the patterns of changes in sales performance are investigated. The results of the simulation suggest various hypotheses concerning consumer-side content-level multihoming on different

Digital Role-Playing Games as Artefacts of Media Culture

Cultural significance of digital role-playing games is associated with dynamic emergence of communication technologies, media entertainment and new – digital – forms of cultural production. However, computer (digital) role-playing games (also called cRPGs) are, mainly in case of scholarly analyses and existing theoretical concepts, often compared to other, mostly live forms of role-playing. The academic reflections on undeniable differences between various types of role-playing tend to suggest that computer role-playing, even though it is a (financially as well as culturally) significant part of the digital games industry, is just a less diverse form of role-play that lacks both formal variety and content ingenuity and thus cannot be used as a tool for socialisation, education or therapy. The article, however, works with a basic assumption that the relationship between contemporary subcultures (or rather taste cultures and lifestyles), entertainment forms, computer role-playing games and the everyday lives of media audiences includes a complex set of aspects and specific features which are socially significant and rich in both form and content. The author focuses on defining digital role-playing games in relation with industrially produced culture, which is disseminated by the media, and argues that they are able to function not only as commercially efficient media products but also as valuable cultural artefacts. The main goal of the text is to offer complex theoretical outlines related to understanding computer role-playing and its cultural significance. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n2p368

Producing alternative gender orders: a critical look at girls and gaming

ABSTRACTThis article examine some of the ways in which girls are discursively set up as subordinate in relation to boys and men by and within the digital games industry and culture at large, and how they push back on these imposed subjects positions when engaging in media production (game development) under both regular and inverse conditions. Expanding on our previous research on gender and game play, this project explores how the hegemonic discourses of female participation in games culture are taken up by girls who want to make their own digital games. We employ a poststructural understanding of gender and power as fluid and produced through and within social relations to demonstrate how participants are not helpless victims of subjection. Rather, these girls are active in the construction of their own subjectivities, leveraging different aspects of their identity and/or exercising an institutionally sanctioned (albeit temporary) autonomy to resist discursive positioning.

Formation and Development of Digital Game Industry in the People’s Republic of China

Formation and Development of Digital Game Industry in the People’s Republic of China

Empirical investigation of key business factors for digital game performance

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces software engineering, business, management, and artistic disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of the business dimension of digital games. The main objective of this research is to investigate empirically the effect of business factors on the performance of digital games in the market and to answer the research questions asked in this study. Game development organizations are facing high pressure and competition in the digital game industry. Business has become a crucial dimension, especially for game development organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key business factors on the business performance of games. This is the first study in the domain of game development that demonstrates the interrelationship between key business factors and game performance in the market. The results of the study provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple business key factors to remain competitive and handle the high pressure in the digital game industry. Furthermore, the results of the study support the theoretical assertion that key business factors play an important role in game business performance.

The Recruitment of Passion and Community in the Service of Capital: Community Managers in the Digital Games Industry

Globalization and technical change have had a significant impact on work in the cultural industries. Online games are services that are networked, operate around the clock and require ongoing player and company input. The industry's content production networks are dispersed internationally, and many of its services are offered transnationally. These new services have generated new forms of work, like community management, which are often outsourced to near-to-market locations. Much of the research on media work is focused on high status creative occupations or the free labour of amateurs. This paper draws upon the findings of a content analysis of job advertisements and face-to-face interviews with community managers to examine the recruitment and work of community managers. Using scholarship on media production, media work and emotional labour this article argues that recruitment and organizational practices surrounding community managers appropriate passion, community, and experience in the service of capital, but also marginalize these workers. While community managers see themselves as creative workers, their visibility and creative autonomy are limited by organizational and workplace cultures.

Interrogating Creative Theory and Creative Work: Inside the Games Studio

The expansion of creative and cultural industries has provided a rich source for theoretical claims and commentary. Much of this reproduces and extends the idea that autonomy is the defining feature of both enterprises and workers. Drawing on evidence from research into Australian development studios in the global digital games industry, the article interrogates claims concerning autonomy and related issues of insecurity and intensity, skill and specialisation, work–play boundaries, identity and attachments. In seeking to reconnect changes in creative labour to the wider production environment and political economy, an argument is advanced that autonomy is deeply contextual and contested as a dimension of the processes of capturing value for firms and workers.