Video Game Production Research Articles

Transculturation in Latin American Video Game Production: Between Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism

This research explores the manifestation of transculturation, a literary paradigm designed to situate Latin American production in the context of globalization, in video game production, evaluating its applicability to the study of cultural representation. Embracing a documentary research and content analysis methodology, the study analyzes 29 video games from nine Latin American countries, classifying them as “regionalist” or “cosmopolitan” based on settings, themes, audiovisual elements, and intertextual references. The regionalist category exhibits a preference for realism, natural settings, representation of myths, and an emphasis on cultural preservation. Conversely, the cosmopolitan category favors the fantastic, urban settings, reinterpretation of myths, and an emphasis on cultural exchange. By scrutinizing video games through the lens of transculturation, the study revalidates this theory as a relevant paradigm for understanding cultural representation in the digital age, offering new insights into the interplay between local and global influences in Latin American video game narratives.

Local issues and global challenges: understanding marketing within the Trans-Tasman video game industry

While there is a growing body of literature concerning video game production by smaller developers, there has been little examination of their marketing and business practices. This article presents the first exploration of the marketing skills, knowledge, and practices within the Trans-Tasman video game industry. Data was collected from thirty-three video game developers across Australia and New Zealand utilizing semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. It was found that, despite developers generally recognizing the importance of marketing, their marketing skills, knowledge, and practices were mixed and uneven. While some developers were undertaking integrated activities such as evaluation and brand management, others did not understand how to. The findings and insights generated have contributed to understandings about Trans-Tasman video game production and have begun to address an important knowledge gap concerning video game developers’ marketing skills, knowledge, and practices.

SyDRA: An approach to understand game engine architecture

Game engines are tools to facilitate video game development. They provide graphics, sound, and physics simulation features, which would have to be otherwise implemented by developers. Even though essential for modern commercial video game development, game engines are complex and developers often struggle to understand their architecture, leading to maintainability and evolution issues that negatively affect video game productions. In this paper, we present the Subsystem-Dependency Recovery Approach (SyDRA), which helps game engine developers understand game engine architecture and therefore make informed game engine development choices. By applying this approach to 10 open-source game engines, we obtain architectural models that can be used to compare game engine architectures and identify and solve issues of excessive coupling and folder nesting. Through a controlled experiment, we show that the inspection of the architectural models derived from SyDRA enables developers to complete tasks related to architectural understanding and impact analysis in less time and with higher correctness than without these models.

Ubisoft’s Notre-Dame

<p>In 2019, the Notre-Dame de Paris was devastated by a fire. The importance of the Notre-Dame as world heritage was underlined by the countless contributions, donations and solidarity all around the world that pledged to help to rebuild the cathedral. Among all contributions Ubisoft’s idea to offer its game Assassin's Creed: Unity for free to the public was arguably most celebrated as innovative and creative measure to secure heritage in case of its destruction. This case opens up new perspectives and roles of heritage management as also the development and distribution of video games in the twenty first century. The case of Ubisoft’s Notre-Dame is discussed in this paper under a comparative analysis to the game Never Alone and a critical inquiry towards the benefits, consequences and repercussions of the growing importance of synchronising heritage protection with video game production. Also, the perceptive aspect of connecting to heritage as player through a game and its spatial aspects will be explained under Chapman’s concept of narrative gardens.</p>

Advancements in Ray Tracing: From Fundamentals to Neural Innovations and Practical Applications

Computer graphics are implemented in a variety of fields, such as digital art, education and training, entertainment, and user interface design. They are a vital tool for human-computer communication. Computer graphics enable people to efficiently communicate abstract thoughts and concepts in the digital sphere through visual representation. The idea of ray tracing is fundamental to this field; it is a rendering technique that is widely used in real-time and non-real-time applications, particularly in video games, television, and movies. This article offers a thorough analysis of ray tracing, covering its fundamental ideas, rendering techniques, and crucial role in the production of video games. It also explores the recently developed field of neural ray tracing, demonstrating how it may be used to further enhance computer graphics. Keywords – Ray Tracing, Rendering, Fundamentals, Computer Graphics, Neural Ray Tracing, Pipeline.

How time flows making games: An ethnographic analysis of experiences of temporality in an indie videogame studio

In research on videogame production, much attention has been given, justifiably, to ‘crunch’, whereby employees in large studios work extremely long hours for months at a time prior to a game’s launch, at the request of management. There has to date been limited research about how duration and urgency are experienced at other periods, and also in the economically and culturally significant ‘independent’ (or indie) sectors and companies. This article draws on a Deleuzian framework initially developed to analyse experience of temporality in academic research, and applies it to data generated by an ethnography of a UK-based indie game studio, which examined how games are produced as part of a more routine working life. The framework enables a re-examination of how ‘passionate’ work in the cultural industries is lived day-to-day, and aims to contribute to debates about the politics of time in the games sector, offering analytic resources which expand the vocabulary for expressing desired experiences of time in game work.

Crowdfunding in the production of video games in Spain: Evolution and success on Kickstarter

This research addresses the use of crowdfunding platforms for the development of video games in Spain. It is part of the group of platform-centred research in order to develop a quantitative analysis of the data contained in them. Specifically, the data provided by Kickstarter for Spanish video game development projects is analysed. Normality tests indicated that the variables do not follow a normal distribution, hence non-parametric tests were used. The success rate of Spanish campaigns is 28.4% for the total number of cases, 40.8% in 2020, which is a steady growth since 2015. The average funding is €16,586.76, €50,056.67 for successful campaigns; however, the median indicates that 50% of the sample does not exceed €1,653 in funding. Regression models are used to develop equations to calculate the amount of funding needed to publish on PC and console, and the number of backers needed to achieve a given amount of funding.

Inevitable or Exploitative? A Case Study of Consumers’ Divergent Attitudes towards Video Game Crunch

As with many media industries, poor labor practices such as crunch—excessive, often unpaid overtime—are common within video game production. Researchers have addressed how industry structures normalize crunch, but game consumers’ integration in this process is less understood. This case study of comments (n = 1,080) on articles about crunch develops an overall perspective on consumer attitudes by coding whether comments support or critique crunch and then evaluating the comments’ main ideas. More comments supported crunch than critiqued it, often treating it as inevitable, justifying paid/short-term crunch, or comparing game development crunch to commenters’ experiences. Conversely, critical comments considered crunch’s negative consequences, blamed its persistence on executives, and advocated for better work practices across industries. While this piece focuses on games, the conclusions potentially speak across media industries by addressing the pervasive nature of “Do What You Love” ideologies and asking: Do consumers care about the conditions under which media is produced?

Bunce Island: Through the Mirror – Epic Games’ MetaHumans and the trans-Atlantic slave trade

ABSTRACT Visualizing the traumatic past is a perennial challenge, particularly for historians of the slave trade. New innovations in digital technologies may offer a transformative framework to address this problem. Epic Games and its Unreal Engine, developed for use in industries such as film and video game production, animation, architectural visualization, and virtual reality simulations, offer one potential avenue to efficiently visualize a challenging past. Epic Games’s MetaHuman Creator – high-fidelity digital humans, fully rigged and able to be quickly animated with little more than an iPhone – offer another related means of viscerally recreating the past in ways which offer new insights for researchers and new tools for educators.

Automated Play-Testing through RL Based Human-Like Play-Styles Generation

The increasing complexity of gameplay mechanisms in modern video games is leading to the emergence of a wider range of ways to play games. The variety of possible play-styles needs to be anticipated and taken into account by designers, through automated tests. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising answer to the need of automating video game testing. To that effect one needs to train an agent to play the game, while ensuring this agent will generate the same play-styles as the players in order to give meaningful feedback to the designers. We present CARMI : a Configurable Agent with Relative Metrics as Input. An agent able to emulate the players play-styles, even on previously unseen levels. Unlike current methods it does not rely on having full trajectories, but only summary data. Moreover it only requires little human data, thus compatible with the constraints of modern video game production. This novel agent could be used to investigate behaviors and balancing during the production of a video game with a realistic amount of training time.

Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell (review).

Reviewed by: Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell Anne Ladyem McDivitt (bio) Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality By Melanie Swalwell. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 256. In Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality, Melanie Swalwell sheds light on homebrew microcomputer game development in New Zealand and Australia in the 1980s, providing important insight into two topics that are typically outside the margins of video game studies. Swalwell argues that homebrew programmers engaged with their microcomputers as both consumers and producers, and this production of homebrew video games by users is the beginning of when digitality became a part of everyday life. Further, Swalwell states that this history is significant because of its inflection on the present. This study analyzes, recalls, and evaluates how everyday users engaged with home computing when it was new. The focus is on creators of games, even if they were not well-known or making very successful or influential games. Swalwell's attention to homebrew development instead tells the stories [End Page 1212] of those who made and learned gaming through their own tinkering with microcomputers. This provides a unique look into video game history and microcomputer usage. The author juxtaposes this work with many existing video game histories that focus primarily on home consoles and arcade games, as well as two scholars, Frank Veraart and Graeme Kirkpatrick, who have written about microcomputer usage in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, respectively. Swalwell looks to fill a gap on microcomputer usage and creation, as well as to disagree with Veraart and Kirkpatrick about the idea of a decline in microcomputer programming in the 1980s. The book shines when Swalwell expertly weaves in engaging anecdotes that provide insight into the microcomputer interests of ordinary people, demonstrating how people came to work with microcomputers and how some of them made small commercial businesses with their games. Some humor is thrown in, such as the anecdote of Ross Symons publishing programming books that taught his teachers how to code and then getting rewarded with a B in his computer science class. There are moments where the narrative leans heavily into the theoretical underpinnings Swalwell utilizes, and this can sometimes throw the reader off the track of the argument being made. Because of this, the book would be a difficult one to assign to undergraduates or for scholars new to the history of technology. This work is significant to the history of video games, but the broader relevance of the topic is somewhat limited for scholars of the history of technology. Sometimes the reader might question the overall goal of the book, as well as what the author means by "vernacular digitality." There is a fantastic section in Chapter 5 that addresses both, and it would have been helpful for the reader to have this appear earlier in the book. There is also a significant amount of signposting that points to other chapters throughout the book, which can be positive or negative depending on the reader. Swalwell mentions the releases of the Sega Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in context with microcomputing and changes to the gaming environment. There is either an error with the release dates on these systems, or it is unclear that we are looking ahead to the end of the 1980s and/or into the next decade (p. 115). For those familiar with video game history, this can be confusing and distracting. The analysis of homebrew game development as a cultural production on a microlevel is well argued and supported through archival sources, personal documents from homebrew developers, and interviews. It creates an engaging narrative about the period and style of game development. This ties into modern indie development, as well as the continued creation of games on microcomputers after the '80s, which Swalwell argues brings past development into relation with present and future gaming. [End Page 1213] Swalwell's focus on the homebrew creators in Australia and New Zealand is a fantastic contribution to the history of video games that focuses on users as creators. It is sure to be a model for those looking at engagement with video games beyond...

An Iranian Videogame Industry? Localizing Videogame Production Beyond The “Global” Videogame Industry

Videogame researchers have long considered the role videogames play in different cultural, social, and political contexts around the world. However, when it comes to researching videogame production, literature on the nominally global videogame industry has primarily focused on the dominant sites of North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. In this article, we argue that entrenched conceptualizations of the global videogame industry risk applying Westerncentric models of success and growth that fail to account for how videogame industries emerge from the interplay of global distribution and local conditions. We contribute to a growing body of scholarship that strives to localize videogame production cultures through an analysis of how Iranian videogame developers navigate local cultural, economic, and regulatory contexts alongside global markets, platforms, and genres. By outlining the formative ambivalence with which Iranian developers engage both with and against the “global” videogame industry, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for different local (and translocal) videogame production cultures mediated by global enterprise.

GAMESTOP FRENZY: CONTRA-HEGEMONIC FINANCE

Purpose- The aim of this study is to evaluate the discussions on the impact of a new investor class, which has emerged with social media and is likened to the Reddit Army by some, over the short sale and short squezee at Gamestop. Gamestop is a US company that sells video games, electronic gadgets and game products. At the origin of the Gamestop event, there was an effort to break the economic power of the giant Hedge Funds, which were short in Gamestop shares, by combining the financial strength of a few hundred dollars of small and amateur investors on the social media platform Reddit. The Reddit Army has focused on hedge funds, which they consider they are engaged in controversial financial short selling practices. Hedge Funds, which thought that Gamestop shares were overvalued, made large short sales. Later, in January 2021, small individual investors organized on Reddit and started a buying movement on Gamestop shares. Small individual investors ensured that the price of the shares, which was $ 20 on January 11, rose to $ 483 in the last week of January, causing the hedge funds to lose billions of dollars. Having a market value of 1 billion dollars at the beginning of 2021, the company reached a market value of 35 billion dollars in the last week of January. Thus, this new group of investors placed huge financial burdens on the short selling hedge funds against Gamestop. Methodology- In the study, the discussion about the Gamestop frenzy in January 2021 has been tried to be put forward through the literature. The arguments in the debates are handled from a critical perspective using a comparative approach. Findings- In the financial markets, the Gamestop story has been taken as a victory for ordinary investing citizens over Wall Street giants. This story is also likened to the David-Goliath story, which tells the struggle of the weak against the strong, and it was thought that a new contra-hegemonic structure is emerging in the financial markets through the conversations in the Reddit subgroups. These small investors, who use social media very actively, came together and caused huge losses of billions of dollars, even if for a moment, against the Wall Street giants. Hedge funds holding open positions in Gamestop stocks made large purchases to close their open positions, making the wave initiated by the Reddit Army much stronger, causing the mechanism known as short squezze. This has caused share prices to rise to high values that are very difficult to bear for those who are in open positions. However, some Wall Street firms that did not have open positions in Gamestop stock bought when prices started to rise in the early January and sold before January 28, when prices peaked, gaining hundreds of millions of dollars. On the other hand, while some of this new investor class lost in Gamestop shares, some gained. Conclusion- With the emergence of low-cost or zero-cost electronic trading platforms on the one hand, and the conversations of small and amateur investors on social media platforms such as Reddit on the other hand, a new era of individual, small, amateur investors who had no power in the financial markets before, now as a new investor class has emerged. By adopting an organized attitude through the social media platform of this new investor class, it has led to an unprecedented development as experienced in the Gamestop frenzy. This development is seen as a structural dimension of the financial markets in the future, and accordingly, it is evaluated as a potential feature that will cause similar situations to the Gamestop frenzy. On the other hand, although it has been understood that small investors have the potential to create a strong wave on some stocks by organizing through social media platforms such as Reddit, it is thought that the repetition of situations similar to the Gamestop frenzy will not occur and this is an exceptional event. However, it is generally accepted that Wall Street giants cannot ignore this new class of investors. The Gamestop frenzy marks the beginning of a period in the financial markets where the attitudes and behaviors of individual small investors cannot be ignored. The adventurous attitude of the Reddit Army in Gamestop shares was seen by many of the financial market stakeholders as a case reflecting the future feature of the financial capitalist system and caused enthusiasm on a global scale. Keywords: Gamestop, short selling, social media, hedge funds, small investors JEL Codes: G11, G24, G41

Normalizing player surveillance through video game infographics

As video game production is becoming increasingly data-driven, player surveillance shapes the everyday realities of users and developers. Remote online tracking and the resulting optimization and governance of in-game activity subscribe to the Big Data methodology as a way of accounting for entire player populations. By design, player surveillance serves the interests of developers and publishers, who have exclusive access to this proprietary data. Yet, discursively, these parties attempt to present surveillance as a mutually beneficial endeavor aimed at improving video games. A part of this strategy is the video game industry’s selective information disclosure, which I explore empirically on the example of telemetry infographics. Based on a thematic analysis of 200 infographics from 127 games, I show how publicly disseminated infographics contribute to the normalization of player surveillance by presenting it as a source of harmless trivia to be collected and shared by fans and the specialized press.

EDITORIAL LINK 2022 Journal: a collection on practice-led research vol. II

Kia ora With are delighted to present the second volume of the Dossier LINK2022 Practice-led research In Communication Design. This collection offers a broad, rich and diverse panorama of practice-oriented research approaches in contemporary times. In this way, the articles demonstrate the potential of these approaches and stimulate new research that expands the potential of this field of increasing relevance and interest to the academic community. This collection is a result of an international partnership between the LINK Practice-led Research Group from the Auckland University of Technology - AUT, in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the Journal GEMInIS from the Federal University of São Carlos – UFSCar and Anhembi Morumbi University. The first part of the second volume addresses the issue of platforms in film festivals, Tik Tok and crunch time practices in video game production. The second part focuses on teaching Design through case studies and teaching practices that address notions such as interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, visuality and materiality. This bilingual version reinforces the LINK Practice-led Research group's commitment to promoting the projects and methodologies used in practice-led research, particularly in Global South epistemologies. Ngā manaakitanga

The metaverse, but not the way you think: game engines and automation beyond game development

ABSTRACT The production of videogames routinely uses automated techniques to generate content, rig animations, map light, and script behaviors. The automation of programming and artistic functions is increasingly baked into game engines that work with other software applications in 3D production ecosystems, which are laying the foundations for what is being pitched by platform companies as the future metaverse. Platform studies has analyzed automated decision-making through the politics of classification. Game studies has investigated engines such as Unreal and Unity as platform tools that consolidate power through asymmetries of interconnectivity and interoperability. This commentary discusses the automaticity of game engines as platform tools for designing and simulating interactive 3D worlds within and beyond games. Outlining the structuring force of game engines from game development and entertainment media to architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing, I speculate on the implications of engines for game workers and game studies.

Challenges and opportunities for collective action and unionization in local games industries

The games industry has seen a burst of new interest in the prospect of unionization. The efforts of organizations like Game Workers Unite have attracted much favorable coverage in the enthusiast and trade industry press, increasing awareness amongst videogame audiences of the difficult working conditions facing professional game developers. However, often missing from these discussions is an articulation of what unionization would look like for the significant number of game developers working in precarious conditions in small, often informal teams. The fragmented nature of contemporary gamework presents challenges in aggregating worker power similar to those found in other fields of creative or precarious work and entrepreneurial careers, where contingent work is typically organized around piecemeal, project–based funding arrangements. In this paper we draw from empirical research with Australian game developers to identify a number of barriers to unionization posed by small-scale game production. We also identify how within these same circumstances, novel and alternative forms of solidarity and collective action are beginning to emerge. The article ultimately argues that any successful attempt to unionize videogame workers will need to both account for, and take advantage of, the complex situation of small-scale videogame production in local contexts.

Only you can save the world (of videogames): Authoritarian agencies in the heroism of videogame design, play, and culture

Joseph Campbell’s classical monomyth claims to describe a universal human narrative: the hero’s journey. For decades, it has commanded a revered position in American literary theory, global media production, and the world of videogames. Although the monomyth is still one of the few recognized approaches to videogame writing, there have been few critical examinations of it as a dominant design paradigm. This article therefore interrogates the power dynamics of monomythic videogames, especially concerning authoritarian agencies in the ‘world savior’ model of many AAA titles. Understanding authoritarianism as an agentic modality of gameplay, the study uses an assemblage-based approach that encompasses the agencies of popular designs and their embedded ideologies; labor conditions of videogame production; gaming culture; political contexts; monomyth- and authoritarianism-saturated media landscapes; exertions of nonhuman actors and player’s subjectivities. To illustrate the patterns of authoritarian modalities in world-savior videogames, I conduct an analysis of Horizon Zero Dawn as an exemplary case study. Finally, I turn to gaming culture for evidence of the potentials that these videogames have to nourish authoritarian sensibilities, highlighting the parallel authoritarian agencies of heroic gameplay and harassment campaigns like GamerGate.

Design and Production of Educational Video Games for the Inclusion of Deaf Children

This work presents the design and development of an educational video game, a product committed to the project "Model for the production of educational digital content for the inclusion of deaf people" attached to the national program financed by Colciencias - Colombia: "Educational and technological pedagogical architecture for teacher training in and for diversity”. The video game was made under the logic of applied and design research. It recognizes the importance of this resource as a didactic tool, which enhances and strengthens the learning process in deaf and hearing children, in the area of ​​natural sciences. Instructional design includes: topic, purpose, target audience, learning objectives, and competencies. For its planning, elaboration and development, the environment, the rules, the challenge and the genre of the game were taken into account, deriving the prototype in the Unity engine.

Situating the videogame maker’s agency through craft

It is now widely accepted that videogames are a cultural form, and that they generate cultural meaning through the possibilities and constraints through which they shape players’ experiences and choices. However, the cultural processes through which videogames are themselves produced remain understudied and too-straightforwardly imagined. The videogame maker does not simply conceive of a videogame idea and then execute it. Instead, the videogame is produced through processes of negotiation and iteration between videogame maker, software and hardware environments and the broader expectations of the field. In this sense, videogame production can be fruitfully understood through the lens of craft. I argue that in order to politicise agency in digital play, as is this special issue’s goal, videogame research must also consider the agency of the videogame maker, and the iterative, embodied, and social processes through which videogames are produced. This article draws from interviews with videogame makers and existing research on craft production to provide a preliminary consideration of how the agency of the videogame maker as a cultural producer can be accounted for.