Article

The cruel optimism of casual games: neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and the valorization of play

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Abstract

Casual games disrupted the games industry, but not in ways commonly believed. What if we left behind the hardcore vs. casual games dichotomy to reveal that casual gameplay and casual game development have extended the neoliberal and neocolonial logic of the industry? Casual games, in terms of design and industry practices, remind us that there is nothing inherently liberating about play. Rather, the design and development practices of casual games should be understood as an extension and acceleration of neoliberal and neocolonial logics. Casual gameplay and casual game development pull us within processes of cruel optimism. These deeply political economic processes endanger free play and creativity and therefore are obstacles to the flourishing of gamers and game developers as free subjects. In this neoliberal and neocolonial game market, cruel optimism is enticing because casual gameplay and game development emerge as powerful actors and practices in a context where the state has globally failed in the distribution of hope.

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An examination of work, the organization of work, and the market forces that surround it, through the lens of the collaborative practice of game development. Rank-and-file game developers bring videogames from concept to product, and yet their work is almost invisible, hidden behind the famous names of publishers, executives, or console manufacturers. In this book, Casey O'Donnell examines the creative collaborative practice of typical game developers. His investigation of why game developers work the way they do sheds light on our understanding of work, the organization of work, and the market forces that shape (and are shaped by) media industries. O'Donnell shows that the ability to play with the underlying systems—technical, conceptual, and social—is at the core of creative and collaborative practice, which is central to the New Economy. When access to underlying systems is undermined, so too is creative collaborative process. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in game studios in the United States and India, O'Donnell stakes out new territory empirically, conceptually, and methodologically. Mimicking the structure of videogames, the book is divided into worlds, within which are levels; and each world ends with a boss fight, a “rant” about lessons learned and tools mastered. O'Donnell describes the process of videogame development from pre-production through production, considering such aspects as experimental systems, “socially mandatory” overtime, and the perpetual startup machine that exhausts young, initially enthusiastic workers. He links work practice to broader systems of publishing, manufacturing, and distribution; introduces the concept of a privileged “actor-intra-internetwork”; and describes patent and copyright enforcement by industry and the state.
Chapter
This chapter offers a historical analysis of how graphical trends in the video game industry affect the gender and sexual politics of video game representation. Our interest in graphical trends means that we are less interested in specific visual representations but rather the broader question of visual regimes. To this end, this chapter first explores how the sexual politics of visuality evolved across the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System. We then focus on the Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider franchises to illustrate how the transition from the realism of the PlayStation 1 era to the photorealism of the PlayStation 3 era resulted in a convergence in sexual representation. Our argument is that the visual structures of contemporary gaming are negatively impacting how games represent women.
Article
This special issue is meant to provide an intervention. We are undertaking this project to broaden the corpus of Games Studies by both critiquing casual as a label, yet simultaneously legitimizing it as an important category of both study and play. Additionally, historicizing the terms casual and hardcore as categories uncovers the ways that the video game industry talks about its products and how academic work often replicates biases against casual games. To this end, we argue that the centrality of core games pushes many important texts to the margins. It is our goal, within this special issue, to revalue and reconsider the role of casual games within the larger ecology of game studies.
Book
Lauren Berlant explores individual and collective affective responses to the unraveling of the U.S. and European economies by analzying mass media, literature, television, film, and video.
Book
In the last decade our mobile phones have been infiltrated by angry birds, our computers by leagues of legends and our social networks by pleas for help down on the farm. As digital games have become networked, mobile and casual they have become a pervasive cultural form. Based on original empirical work, including interviews with workers, virtual ethnographies in online games and analysis of industry related documents, Global Games provides a political, economic and sociological analysis of the growth and restructuring of the digital games industry over the past decade. Situating the games industry as both cultural and creative and examining the relative growth of console, PC, online and mobile, Aphra Kerr analyses the core production logics in the industry, and the expansion of circulation processes as game services have developed. In an industry dominated by North American and Japanese companies, Kerr explores the recent success of companies from China and Europe, and the emergent spatial politics as countries, cities, companies and communities compete to reshape digital games in the networked age.
Article
Recent years have seen changes to the video game industry and the image of video game players. There are more games on the market and a larger variety of ways to play those games. Yet, despite market shifts, authors such as Shaw demonstrate that there are still tensions surrounding gamer identification. Even as next-generation systems (such as the Xbox One, the PlayStation 4, and the Wii U) and casual gaming take hold of the market, tension remains between the perceptions of who is playing versus the reality of actual players. In our study, we perform a content analysis of video game commercials in 2013 to explore questions of diversity—particularly in terms of portrayals of the player’s sex and ethnicity—to consider how the gamer is represented in terms of physical and behavioral attributes.
Article
The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games that promote shorter periods of game play. Free to download, but structured around micro-payments, these games raise the complex relationship between game design and commercial strategies. Although offering a free gameplay experience in line with open access philosophies, these games also create systems that offer control over the temporal dynamics of that experience to monetise player attention and inattention. This article will examine three ‘freemium’ games, Snoopy Street Fair, The Simpsons’ Tapped Out and Dragonvale, to explore how they combine established branding strategies with gameplay methods that monetise player impatience. In examining these games, this article will ultimately indicate the need for game studies to interrogate the intersection between commercial motivations and game design 2 and a broader need for media and cultural studies to consider the social, cultural, economic and political implications of impatience.
Book
In the world of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), Faunasphere was but a blip on the screen in its short public life from 2009 to 2011. Its devoted players, many of them middle—aged women, entered a world that did not build on common fantasy or science-fiction tropes. There was no evil to defeat or realms to conquer, only friendly animals to care for and pollution to fight. In Players and Their Pets, Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy argue that its very difference makes it critically important—even more so than the large, commercially successful games such as World of Warcraft that have all too often shaped game studies discourse. Consalvo and Begy demonstrate how the beta period of an MMOG can establish social norms that guide how the game is played. They also show how a game’s platform creates expectations for how the game will work and who is playing it—and what happens when those expectations clash with the reality. Even while telling the story of this particular game and its predominantly female players, however, Players and Their Pets cautions against oversimplifying players based on their gender. Faunasphere’s playerbase enjoyed diverse aspects of the game, for varied reasons. No other game studies book tracks the entire life cycle of an online game to examine how the game evolved in terms of design as well as how its player community responded to changes and events. The brief life of Faunasphere makes this possible. © 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
Book
The rapid growth of the Korean online game industry, viewed in social, cultural, and economic contexts. In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms. Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing—a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea's local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West's dominance in global markets.
Article
This article foregrounds the concept of immaterial labor to theorize the tension between the precarity of below the line workers and the glamor of above the line workers in the video game industry. I argue that even the most seemingly secure sections of the gaming workforce have a tendency to drift toward the economic precarity most acutely felt across below the line workers. In other words, we, as researchers, may need to question the presumed hard break between the above and below the line work experiences of employees in the game industry in light of the increase in processes of deskilling, outsourcing, and financialization. Moreover, I assert that workers, like game testers, are attracted to below the line positions as through-ports to the glamorous core sections of game labor: design, art, and programming. As such, they are interpellated to the ideology of creativity and practices of hope labor. The theoretical insights developed in the article draw on 2.5-year ethnographic work in a medium-sized game studio in the US, during which above and below the line digital laborers, and their spouses, were interviewed alongside participatory observation.
Article
The labor of video game testers has barely registered within political-economic analyses of work practices in the game industry. This article addresses this gap through a critical deployment of the concept of precarity and its multiform nature experienced by game testers. Drawing on Harry Braverman’s concept of “degradation of labor,” I aim to contribute to media labor literature by introducing the concept of “degradation of fun,” where testers are alienated from play and forced to develop instrumental and selective ways of play. I make the argument that as opposed to popular representations, game testing is a decidedly precarious labor, due to its assumed low-skill status, and because of the existence of a large reserve army of labor, which depresses the wages and renders testers expendable. Ultimately, the “immateriality” and joy of testing as labor comes with material physical and bodily pains, and sentiments of second-class citizenship.
Article
This article analyzes Free Rice within the context of “the rise of the ludic sublime,” where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of “philitainment,” Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed “communicative capitalism” and therefore both captures resistance and actually solidifies global capitalism. Ultimately, this case study of Free Rice reveals ways in which practices of philitainment signal the proliferation of a convergence between the technological sublime and neoliberal politics through which the disinvestment of the state from social problems is legitimized and reproduced through a reconfiguration of citizenship in terms of techno-consumerism.
Book
We used to think that video games were mostly for young men, but with the success of the Nintendo Wii, and the proliferation of games in browsers, cell phone games, and social games video games changed changed fundamentally in the years from 2000 to 2010. These new casual games are now played by men and women, young and old. Players need not possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games show a dedication and skill that is anything but casual. In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul describes this as a reinvention of video games, and of our image of video game players, and explores what this tells us about the players, the games, and their interaction. With this reinvention of video games, the game industry reconnects with a general audience. Many of today's casual game players once enjoyed Pac-Man, Tetris, and other early games, only to drop out when video games became more time-consuming and complex. Juul shows that it is only by understanding what a game requires of players, what players bring to a game, how the game industry works, and how video games have developed historically that we can understand what makes video games fun and why we choose to play (or not to play) them.
Article
This article offers a feminist critique of happiness. It proceeds by suspending belief that happiness is a good thing, or that happiness is what we want, as beliefs that are central to the intellectual history of happiness. The article suggests that feminist histories might offer an alternative history of happiness. It shows how happiness is what makes some things into goods (happy objects are those that are anticipated to cause happiness) and introduces the concept of conditional happiness, when one person’s happiness is made conditional upon another’s, to explore how, for some, happiness means following other people’s goods. The article considers feminist consciousness as a consciousness of unhappiness, of what is lost or is given up by following the paths of happiness. Such consciousness does not necessarily involve a form of self‐consciousness but a worldly consciousness in which unhappiness disturbs the familiar. The article reflects specifically on black feminist consciousness as a consciousness of what does not get noticed when happiness provides a horizon of experience. It concludes by suggesting that feminists might want to claim the freedom to be unhappy without making unhappiness into a political cause.
Article
Presents a critical review of "The Oregon Trail" CD-ROMs. Argues that "The Oregon Trail" is sexist, racist, culturally insensitive, and contemptuous of the earth, imparting bad values and wrong history. Suggests questions teachers can ask before choosing to use these materials, and offers classroom activities to develop students' critical computer literacy. (SR)
Article
This article examines the racialization of informational labor in machinima about Chinese player workers in the massively multiplayer online role playing game World of Warcraft. Such fan-produced video content extends the representational space of the game and produces overtly racist narrative space to attach to a narrative that, while carefully avoiding explicit references to racism or racial conflict in our world, is premised upon a racial war in an imaginary world—the World of Azeroth. This profiling activity is part of a larger biometric turn initiated by digital culture's informationalization of the body and illustrates the problematics of informationalized capitalism. If late capitalism is characterized by the requirement for subjects to be possessive individuals, to make claims to citizenship based on ownership of property, then player workers are unnatural subjects in that they are unable to obtain avatarial self-possession. The painful paradox of this dynamic lies in the ways that it mirrors the dispossession of information workers in the Fourth Worlds engendered by ongoing processes of globalization. As long as Asian “farmers” are figured as unwanted guest workers within the culture of MMOs, user-produced extensions of MMO-space like machinima will most likely continue to depict Asian culture as threatening to the beauty and desirability of shared virtual space in the World of Warcraft.
Article
Does using a computer game improve students’ motivation to learn classroom material? The current study examined students’ motivation to learn history concepts while playing a commercial, off-the-shelf computer game, Civilization III. The study examined the effect of using conceptual scaffolds to accompany game play. Students from three ninth-grade classrooms were assigned to one of three groups: one group used an expert generated concept map, one group constructed their own concept maps, and a control group used no map. It was predicted that the use of concept maps would enhance the educational value of the game playing activity, in particular students’ motivational levels; however, the opposite happened. Students who used a concept map showed lower motivation on the task relative to their baseline motivation for regular classroom instruction. In contrast, the levels of motivation in playing the game, for students in the control group, met or exceeded their levels of motivation during regular classroom instruction. These results suggest that using a conceptual scaffold can decrease students’ motivation to learn classroom material through game play, perhaps because conceptual maps can (a) focus students’ attention on the difficulty of learning the concepts and on the extrinsic rewards for playing the game and (b) make game play less autonomous, less creative, and less active. All of these can negate the primary property that provides playing its principal potential pedagogical power: fun.
Article
The article explores the relationship between genocide and the settler colonialism. The author asserts that though the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal-they should be distinguished. The article further analyzes the negative and positive dimensions of settler colonialism. While on the one hand it attempts to dissolve native societies, it also establishes a new colonial society on the seized land base.
Video and PC games are the most fun home entertainment activity, reveals new national IDSA survey
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Baka, J. (1998). Video and PC games are the most fun home entertainment activity, reveals new national IDSA survey. Interactive Digital Software Association.
Women really click with the Sims. NY Daily News
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Huguenin, P. (2008). Women really click with the Sims. NY Daily News. Retrieved from http:// www.nydailynews.com/life-style/women-click-sims-article-1.283191
Report of the quality of life survey
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Adults and video games. Pew Research
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Lenhart, A., Jones, S., & MacGill, A. (2008). Adults and video games. Pew Research. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2008/12/07/adults-and-video-games/