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This paper draws on critical political economic theory to discuss the implications of the dominant mode of production and circulation of "Triple-A" or blockbuster console games. It is argued that the seventh generation Triple-A game is a highly standardized cultural commodity giving way to two distinctive "formatting strategies", which taken together, draw attention to the console game's hybrid nature; being a physical, disc-based artefact that is digitally extended via DLC (downloadable content). This hybridity invites questions as to the commodity form's techno-economic particularities vis-à-vis publishing strategies of non-software based cultural commodities, such as movies and TV series. The popular Call of Duty series of first person shooters serves as case study to demonstrate how game publisher Activision Blizzard not only formalized and institutionalized the annualization of the serialization strategy, the publisher also upped the ante in terms of post-launch content, theorized as "branched serialization". The Call of Duty series demonstrates that the rules of play for Triple-A games are as much governed by a game's internal ludic properties as they are structured and alternated by a distinctive and very explicit market logic. In this sense, the Triple-A game never seems truly finished; it is marketed by game publishers and positioned by critics as an unfinished commodity.

This paper draws on critical political economic theory to discuss the implications of the dominant mode of production and circulation of "Triple-A" or blockbuster console games. It is argued that the seventh generation Triple-A game is a highly standardized cultural commodity giving way to two distinctive "formatting strategies", which taken together, draw attention to the console game's hybrid nature; being a physical, disc-based artefact that is digitally extended via DLC (downloadable content). This hybridity invites questions as to the commodity form's techno-economic particularities vis-à-vis publishing strategies of non-software based cultural commodities, such as movies and TV series. The popular Call of Duty series of first person shooters serves as case study to demonstrate how game publisher Activision Blizzard not only formalized and institutionalized the annualization of the serialization strategy, the publisher also upped the ante in terms of post-launch content, theorized as "branched serialization". The Call of Duty series demonstrates that the rules of play for Triple-A games are as much governed by a game's internal ludic properties as they are structured and alternated by a distinctive and very explicit market logic. In this sense, the Triple-A game never seems truly finished; it is marketed by game publishers and positioned by critics as an unfinished commodity.

This paper draws on critical political economic theory to discuss the implications of the dominant mode of production and circulation of "Triple-A" or blockbuster console games. It is argued that the seventh generation Triple-A game is a highly standardized cultural commodity giving way to two distinctive "formatting strategies", which taken together, draw attention to the console game's hybrid nature; being a physical, disc-based artefact that is digitally extended via DLC (downloadable content). This hybridity invites questions as to the commodity form's techno-economic particularities vis-à-vis publishing strategies of non-software based cultural commodities, such as movies and TV series. The popular Call of Duty series of first person shooters serves as case study to demonstrate how game publisher Activision Blizzard not only formalized and institutionalized the annualization of the serialization strategy, the publisher also upped the ante in terms of post-launch content, theorized as "branched serialization". The Call of Duty series demonstrates that the rules of play for Triple-A games are as much governed by a game's internal ludic properties as they are structured and alternated by a distinctive and very explicit market logic. In this sense, the Triple-A game never seems truly finished; it is marketed by game publishers and positioned by critics as an unfinished commodity.

This article investigates the public confessions of a small group of ex-Facebook employees, investors, and founders who express regret helping to build the social media platform. Prompted by Facebook's role in the 2016 United States elections and pointing to the platform's unintended consequences, the confessions are more than formal admissions of sins. They speak of Facebook's capacity to damage democratic decision-making and "exploit human psychology," suggesting that individual users, children in particular, should disconnect. Rather than expressions of truth, this emerging form of corporate abdication constructs dystopian narratives that have the power shape our future visions of social platforms and give rise to new utopias. As such, and marking a stark break with decades of technological utopianism, the confessions are an emergent form of Silicon Valley dystopianism.

This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally "contingent," that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback.

International audience ; In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. Building on a descriptive taxonomy of games and gaming by both genre and 'platform', this is an introduction to games and gaming for those with a cultural studies background. While ideally, game studies will develop also as cultural critique, this is a far cry from dominant practice in the gamer community. Gamers tend to be 'hand-in-glove' with the industry. It is high time for game studies to turn a critical eye on itself.

In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. Building on a descriptive taxonomy of games and gaming by both genre and 'platform', this is an introduction to games and gaming for those with a cultural studies background. While ideally, game studies will develop also as cultural critique, this is a far cry from dominant practice in the gamer community. Gamers tend to be 'hand-in-glove' with the industry. It is high time for game studies to turn a critical eye on itself.

This article seeks to make the relationship between non-market game developers (modders) and the game developer company explicit through game technology. It investigates a particular type of modding, i.e. total conversion mod teams, whose organization can be said to conform to the high-risk, technologically-advanced, capital-intensive, proprietary practice of the developer company. The notion 'proprietary experience' is applied to indicate an industrial logic underlying many mod projects. In addition to a particular user-driven mode of cultural production, mods as proprietary extensions build upon proprietary technology and are not simple redesigned games, because modders tend to follow a particular marketing and industrial discourse with corresponding industrial-like practices.

This article investigates the ways content producers, marketers, and other promotional stakeholders work to optimize cultural goods and services for platform-dependent production, distribution, and monetization. We are particularly interested in how content creators find novel ways to work within, around, and even against platform politics and policies by manipulating algorithms, business models, and guidelines, or otherwise readying their content for optimal circulation on multiple platforms. Through comparative cases of music, games, and apps that draw on trade press and industry discourse, institutional and financial analysis, and select interviews with musicians, we consider various forms of, and strategies for, what we call cultural optimization. We draw on these instances to better understand the similarities and differences in the optimization of cultural content and metadata for economic or cultural gains. We hope our comparative approach reveals different conceptions of the term optimization, and that this term—in all its digital, financial, and cybernetic connotations—might prompt new ways of thinking about the interactions between content, (meta)data, platforms, and culture that have long shaped the circulation of cultural goods.

The purpose of this article is to operationalise an evolutionary perspective on the history of social media and to trace Facebook's evolution from a social networking site to a "platform-as-infrastructure". Social media platforms such as Facebook change constantly on the level of their platform architectures, interfaces, governance frameworks, and control mechanisms, all while responding to their larger environments. By examining the evolution of Facebook's programmability and corporate partnerships, we develop an empirical historical analysis of the platform's boundary dynamics that ultimately determine its operational scale and scope. Based on our analysis of a unique set of archived primary sources, we discern four main stages in Facebook's long-term evolution and discuss the interplay between ongoing processes of "platformisation" and "infrastructuralisation". We argue that these terms foreground complementary aspects of the platform's efforts in balancing its expansion and adaptability to changing user needs and other "environmental dynamics" without risking its integrations and embedding in other domains, such as advertising, marketing, and publishing. Ultimately, our contribution illustrates how empirical platform histories can denaturalise the current dominant position of social media platforms, such as Facebook, revealing over a decade of incremental evolution rather than revolution.