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For over a decade, scholars have considered how digital play has converged with the work of media production. From esports and volunteer moderation to play-testing, the circuits of game production are accelerated by players' passionate engagements as fans and hobbyists, which are intertwined with their professional ambitions to join the industry. It is now taken for granted in scholarly discourse that work and play, production and consumption, and professional and amateur identities are blurring. Researchers propose hybrid terms such as 'prosumption' or 'playbour' to capture the variation, complexity and contradictions in media participation and value creation across diverse fan practices. This analysis proposes that these post-Fordist neologisms oversimplify techno-cultural changes and legitimate ambiguities in fans' relationships with media companies and their imperatives for productivism in platform capitalism and its gig economies. In contrast, hobbies have always been a mediating category of productive leisure that can be traced back to industrialization's cleavage of labour from recreation. This article argues that charting how this liminal category of hobbies has been institutionalized in contemporary media practices provides an analytical lens to interrogate post-Fordist obligations of productivity and neo-liberal expectations of entrepreneurialism.

This article uses a discursive analysis of personal blogging handbooks and personal blogs to reflect on the politics of user-generated content (UGC) as it is created, circulated, valuated, quantified, and monetized by different social media platforms. In doing so, this article traces the contours of an increasingly commercialized blogosphere and the tensions and perceived trade-offs that ensue for professional and quotidian bloggers. By reconstructing the ecology of platforms that form the sociotechnical machinery of the blogosphere, the rifts between the empowerment rhetoric of Web 2.0 and the statistical and experiential realities faced by quotidian bloggers become palpable. Suspended between a vibrant vision of blogging as a surefire ticket to fame and fortune and a sobering structural reality of obscurity and tedium, bloggers are recalibrating their collective delusions of grandeur by constructing alternative economies of exchange. Instead of valuating their self-professed labor monetarily or quantitatively, bloggers are reverting to more attainable small-scale social exchanges that are qualitative in form. More than hits, links, and votes, bloggers appear to value a virtual pat on the back, a reassuring remark, a sincere conversation. However, as the machinery of the blogosphere chugs on, the sociotechnical biases of its architectures of participation will be increasingly unable to cater to these bloggers' needs. This article demonstrates how the politics of UGC can illuminate the infectious rhetoric of Web 2.0, situate the enterprise of blogging within the socioeconomic logic of prosumption, and pave the way toward a better understanding of our communal media futures.

"Once celebrated for connecting people and circulating ideas, social media are facing mounting criticisms about their anticompetitive reach, addictive design, and toxicity to democracy. Known cumulatively as the "techlash," journalists, users, and politicians are asking social media platforms to account for being too big, too engaging, and too unruly. In the age of the techlash, strategies to regulate how platforms operate technically, economically, and legally, are often stacked against individual tactics to manage the effects of social media by disconnecting from them. These disconnection practices-from restricting screen time and detoxing from device use to deleting apps and accounts-often reinforce rather than confront the ways social media organize attention, everyday life, and society. Reckoning with Social Media challenges the prevailing critique of social media that pits small gestures against big changes, that either celebrates personal transformation or champions structural reformation. This edited volume reframes evaluative claims about disconnection practices as either restorative or reformative of current social media systems by beginning where other studies conclude: the ambivalence, commodification, and complicity of separating from social media"--

Technopharmacology is a modest call to expand media theoretical inquiry by attending to the biological, neurological, and pharmacological dimensions of media and centers on emergent affinities between big data and big pharma.

'Technopharmacology' is a modest call to expand media theoretical inquiry by attending to the biological, neurological, and pharmacological dimensions of media and centers on emergent affinities between big data and big pharma.

This article examines how the process of platformisation is manifesting in videogame development. Rather than reinforcing a top-down perspective of platformisation centred on distribution platforms like app stores, we focus on often overlooked game-making tools and the independent, entrepreneurial, and fringe communities that govern and use them. We draw on case studies of Unity and Twine, two such tools that have transformed videogame creation and distribution. By considering how they complicate existing understandings and definitions of both 'platform' and 'platformisation', we move beyond reductive narratives that frame platformisation as a fixed, hegemonic process. Instead, we reveal a much more ambiguous and complex relationship between game makers and the platforms they use.

This article examines how the process of platformisation is manifesting in videogame development. Rather than reinforcing a top-down perspective of platformisation centred on distribution platforms like app stores, we focus on often overlooked game-making tools and the independent, entrepreneurial, and fringe communities that govern and use them. We draw on case studies of Unity and Twine, two such tools that have transformed videogame creation and distribution. By considering how they complicate existing understandings and definitions of both 'platform' and 'platformisation', we move beyond reductive narratives that frame platformisation as a fixed, hegemonic process. Instead, we reveal a much more ambiguous and complex relationship between game makers and the platforms they use. ; Peer reviewed

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