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By analyzing and contextualizing different aspects of the Finnish game development scene, this article provides concrete examples of why we need cultural studies of game development and how game development cultures can be studied. The article follows a three-layer approach, first exploring some of the historical and political developments that have shaped forms of local game production. Second, a focus is placed on working cultures within the industry and attitudes toward crunch time, work–life balance, and workplace regulation. Third, everyday strategies of organizing creative work are analyzed to better understand game studio cultures. The lessons from this empirical study directly contribute to the larger scholarly discussions around game production and creative labor. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

This article examines the relevance and applicability of ideology criticism to the study of video games. The aim is to highlight the sophistication and detail of the experiences video games render for a player. As video games have become highly popular and mainstream, we consider that it is crucial to study the political and ideological realities they offer. In this article we commit a close reading of Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption series from an Althusserian perspective and discover that critical analysis yields interesting insights of the social order designed for the game world. To form a better understanding of ideological underpinnings of these designed systems of play, we also inspect the material conditions under which they were created. We find that ideological and political analysis of a blockbuster game contributes to a better understanding of ways in which games operate and what kind of social and political realities they offer. ; publishedVersion ; 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

Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries. The book reveals why retail matters as a site of transactional significance to industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and interactional participation for consumers. In addition to examining how industries connect books, DVDs, video games, lifestyle products, toys, and more to consumers, it also interrogates the changes in media circulation driven by the collision of digital platforms with existing retail institutions. By grappling with the contexts in which we buy media, Point of Sale uncovers the underlying tensions that define the contemporary culture industries