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Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Introduction: Why Game Production Matters? -- Contributors -- Labour -- 1. Hobbyist Game Making Between Self-Exploitation and Self- Emancipation -- 2. Self-Making and Game Making in the Future of Work -- 3. Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Circulations and Biographies of French Game Workers in a 'Global Games' Era -- 4. Intermediating the Everyday : Indie Game Development and the Labour of Co-Working Spaces -- Development -- 5. Game Developers Playing Games : Instrumental Play, Game Talk, and Preserving the Joy of Play -- 6. Game Development Live on Twitch : Observations of Practice and Educational Synergies -- 7. Unity Production: Capturing the Everyday Game Maker Market -- 8. More Than One Flop from Bankruptcy : Rethinking Sustainable Independent Game Development -- Publishing & Monetization -- 9. How to Study Game Publishers: Activision Blizzard's Corporate History -- 10. Who Creates Microtransactions : The Production Context of Video Game Monetization -- 11. Regulating In-Game Monetization : Implications of Regulation on Games Production -- Regional Perspectives -- 12. Promises of the Periphery : Producing Games in the Communist and Transformation-Era Czechoslovakia -- 13. Construction and Negotiation of Entrepreneurial Subjectivities in the Polish Video Game Industry -- 14. The Development of Greater China's Games Industry : From Copying to Imitation to Innovation -- Before and After: Towards Inclusive Production Studies, Theories, and Methods -- Complete Bibliography -- Index

Video games have entered the cultural mainstream and in terms of economic profits they now rival established entertainment industries such as film or television. As careers in video game development become more common, so do the stories about precarious working conditions and structural inequalities within the industry. Yet, scholars have largely overlooked video game production cultures in favor of studying games themselves and player audiences. In Game Production Studies, an international group of established and emerging researchers takes a closer look at the everyday realities of video game production, ranging from commercial industries to independent creators and cultural intermediaries. Across sixteen chapters, the authors deal with issues related to labour, game development, monetization and publishing, as well as local specificities. As the first edited collection dedicated solely to video game production, this volume provides a timely resource for anyone interested in how games are made and at what costs

Role-playing games offer a chance to pretend, make believe, and share fantasy. They often invoke heavy themes into their game play: morality, violence, politics, spirituality, or sexuality. Although interesting moral debates perennially appear in the media and academia concerning the appropriateness of games' ability to deal with such adult concepts, very little is known about the intersection between games, playfulness, and sexuality and what this might mean for players. This book offers an in-depth, ethnographic look into the phenomenon of erotic role-play through the experiences of players in multiplayer and tabletop role-playing games. Brown explores why participants engage in erotic role-play; discusses the rules involved in erotic role-play; and uncovers what playing with sexuality in ludic environments means for players, their partners, and their everyday lives. Taken together, this book provides a rich, nuanced, and detailed account of a provocative topic.

Role-playing games offer a chance to pretend, make believe, and share fantasy. They often invoke heavy themes into their game play: morality, violence, politics, spirituality, or sexuality. Although interesting moral debates perennially appear in the media and academia concerning the appropriateness of games' ability to deal with such adult concepts, very little is known about the intersection between games, playfulness, and sexuality and what this might mean for players.This book offers an in-depth, ethnographic look into the phenomenon of erotic role-play through the experiences of players i

The purpose of this research is to study the impact of playing modern military shooter (MMS) video games, and how they influence the perceptions of players. This is specifically in terms of how patriotic they consider themselves to be and what they think of American foreign policy. The literature review explores the media framing theory as it relates to video games, as well as the connection between video games and the military as both a recruiting and training method. The methodology sections describes how the participants were involved in the study through a survey inquiring about their political views, how patriotic they believed themselves to be, and the amount of time per week spent playing MMS video games. The data that was gathered from this survey was then processed through an ANOVA test to find the results. The researchers created three hypotheses: 1) as the hours of play increase within MMS games, so will an individual's perception of American patriotism, 2) conservative gamers will identify more with pro-American points of view in MMS games than liberal gamers, 3) a gamer's age will determine how they perceive American patriotism and imperialism in MMS games. Finally, the researchers discuss the data and its implications, what limitations inhibited the study, and what future research projects can improve on.

"This book offers an overview of how conflicts are represented and enacted in games, in a variety of genres and game systems. Games are a cultural form apt at representing real world conflicts, and this edited volume highlights the intrinsic connection between games and conflict through a set of theoretical and empirical studies. It interrogates the nature and use of conflicts as a fundamental aspect of game design, and how a wide variety of conflicts can be represented in digital and analogue games. The book asks what we can learn from conflicts in games, how our understanding of conflicts change when we turn them into playful objects, and what types of conflicts are still not represented in games. It queries the way games make us think about armed conflict, and how games can help us understand such conflicts in new ways. Offering a deeper understanding of how games can serve political, pedagogical, or persuasive purposes, this volume will interest scholars and students working in fields such as game studies, media studies, and war studies"--

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com While all media are part of intermedial networks, video games are often at the nexus of that network. They not only employ cinematics, embedded books, and in-world television screens for various purposes, but, in our convergence culture, video games also play a vital role in allowing players to explore transmedia storyworlds. At the same time, video games are frequently thematized and remediated in film, television, and literature. Indeed, the central role video games assume in intermedial networks provides testament to their significance in the contemporary media environment. In this volume, an international group of contributors discuss not only intermedial phenomena in video games, but also the intermedial networks surrounding them. Intermedia Games-Games Inter Media will deepen readers' understanding of the convergence culture of the early twenty-first century and video games' role in it.

As a media form entwined in the U.S. military-industrial complex, video games continue to celebrate imperialist imagery and Western-centric narratives of the great white explorer (Breger, 2008; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Geyser & Tshalabala, 2011; Mukherjee, 2016). While much ink has been spilt on the detrimental effects of colonial imagery on those it objectifies and dehumanises, the question is why these games still get made, and what mechanisms are at work in the enjoyment of empire-themed play experiences. To explore this question, this article develops the concept of 'casual empire', suggesting that the wish to play games as a casual pastime expedites the incidental circulation of imperialist ideology. Three examples – Resident Evil V (2009), The Conquest: Colonization (2015) and Playing History: Slave Trade (2013) – are used to demonstrate the production and consumption of casual empire across multiple platforms, genres and player bases. Following a brief contextualisation of postcolonial (game) studies, this article addresses casual design, by which I understand game designers' casual reproduction of inferential racism (Hall, 1995) for the sake of entertainment. I then look at casual play, and players' attitudes to games as rational commodities continuing a history of commodity racism (McClintock, 1995). Finally, the article investigates the casual involvement of formalist game studies in the construction of imperial values. These three dimensions of the casual – design, play and academia – make up the three pillars of the casual empire that must be challenged to undermine video games' neocolonialist praxis.

Gaming Representation' offers a timely and interdisciplinary call for greater inclusivity in video games. The issue of equality transcends the current focus in the field of Game Studies on code, materiality, and platforms. Journalists and bloggers have begun to hold the digital game industry and culture accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged behind. Contributors to this volume examine portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, 'Gaming Representation' pushes gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination