Accounts of digital game production are increasingly at the forefront of how we document and theorize conditions and transformations of how cultural media are produced, regulated, distributed, marketed, and consumed. These accounts have typically examined games as a global industry that coexists with and contributes to the formation of national industries, including publisher and studio formations, geopolitics, tax breaks and credits, regional regulatory frameworks, and cultural sovereignty. This introduction to the special issue “Local Game Production” reasserts the analytical value in using locality as an entry point for the study of digital game production. The special issue offers four articles that confront economic, labour, and technical formations in game production, and expose the encounters of localities with globalization. These articles reveal why considerations of the local are critical in understanding the wider infrastructures, governance frameworks, and economies that shape the production of culture through global games. Each article underscores the inequities in how game production localities leverage power via platforms, nation-states and economic regions, and predominant cultural activities.
Accounts of digital game production are increasingly at the forefront of how we document and theorize conditions and transformations of how cultural media are produced, regulated, distributed, marketed, and consumed. These accounts have typically examined games as a global industry that coexists with and contributes to the formation of national industries, including publisher and studio formations, geopolitics, tax breaks and credits, regional regulatory frameworks, and cultural sovereignty. This special issue adds to this growing area of game production studies by examining contemporary cultural formations of locality, focusing on the relational connections and contextual moments that shape articulations of place beyond physical scale and geographical space. Locality here is defined as the area of space where connections between actors, infrastructures, and governance create contextual moments of community. Localities of game production have primarily developed from the connections between creators and players who use the developer tools and game platforms that formulate production and player communities around the manufactured artifacts of games. These communities express geographical and virtual aspects of locality via these infrastructures, which are shaped by the overarching governance structures of government, industry, and culture.
Structurally, analyses of local game production have typically leant toward three overlapping areas of investigation. The first is the technological, legal, and distribution centralization of the game platform. Since the North American video game crash of 1983, companies like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have developed console platforms to control the production and publication of games, limiting studios and third-party publishers to proprietary development tools and stringent legal frameworks. Despite the increased popularity of PC gaming and mobile platforms initially seeming to offer more options for developers, storefronts such as Steam and the Apple App Store also control access to distribution platforms and development tools and set standards for moderating authorized content in similar ways. Though operating in numerous geographic regions around the globe, these platform companies draw together numerous game production and ancillary services connected by the legal, technical, and financial frameworks of the console. Accounts of these closed circuits of production have examined the specific technical infrastructures used to prevent unlicensed game production and distribution,
Second, the dominance of game platforms developed in a small handful of countries has led to a proliferation of centre–periphery analyses of regional and national game industries. Accounts in this second area have overwhelmingly focused on the influence of Japan,
Third, cultural accounts have revealed the broader informal game production communities, identities, and practices that exist at the periphery of formalized game industries while further underpinning the importance of global networks of platform technologies and regional industries in shaping those communities. These cultural activities include game jams, where hundreds of gamemakers produce dozens of games over a few days;
Altogether, these areas represent the connections of localities in the global game industry. This special issue provides fresh accounts of these connections to scrutinize the tensions between platforms, publishers, nation-states, and the wider cultural activities at the periphery as it develops into, and emerges out of, geographic and virtual localities. The first article by Anne Heslinga studies the Dutch game industry to consider the ways in which local game development in the Netherlands has become contingent upon a limited number of US and East Asian platforms. Heslinga finds that Dutch game developers have become increasingly tied to a small number of platforms for distributing games, where they face steep global competition. The second article by Hugh Davies examines the diverse networks of southern Chinese gamemakers and their emergence out of an energetic milieu of game jams, award events, expos, and informal social gatherings. Davies draws out the pivotal role of community-led support networks in the growth of indie game production in the South China region. The third article by K. T. Wong surveys the recent release of games developed in the Malaysian game industry, typified for its below-the-line outsourcing work. Wong reveals how globalization has given rise to an emergent, heterogeneous development milieu of mobile and multiplatform game production in Malaysia. The final article by Scott DeJong and Michael Iantorno analyses the gig economy online work platform Fiverr to investigate users who sell complete game design services to global clients. They found that government training programs focused on digital freelancing, a decrease in local employment during the pandemic, and a global surge in demand for online creative services led to the emergence of complete game design services from freelancers predominantly in Pakistan.
Taken together, these articles confront economic, labour, and technical formations in game production and expose the encounters of localities with globalization. This special issue reasserts the analytical value in using locality as an entry point for the study of digital game production. The contributors to this issue reveal why considerations of the local are critical in understanding the wider infrastructures, governance frameworks, and economies that shape the production of culture through global games. Each contribution underscores the inequities in how game production localities leverage power via platforms, nation-states and economic regions, and predominant cultural activities. While this special issue features some under-examined localities outside of the global industry’s dominant centers, future directions can consider the role of other areas of space where connections between actors, infrastructures, and governance create the contextual moments of community across local game production. One way forward, and perhaps a more inclusive one to undervalued segments of game production, is the examination of cultural activities at the periphery of platforms and formalized industry. Such accounts tend to emphasize the cultural distinctiveness and contribution of localities in shaping wider movements, genres, and industry norms.
Casey O’Donnell, “The Nintendo Entertainment System and the 10NES Chip: Carving the Video Game Industry in Silicon,”
Jennifer R. Whitson, “Voodoo Software and Boundary Objects in Game Development: How Developers Collaborate and Conflict with Game Engines and Art Tools,”
David B. Nieborg, “From Premium to Freemium: The Political Economy of the App,” in
Mia Consalvo,
Roland Burke, “The Future in a Vault of Plastic: Physical Geolocking in the Era of 16-Bit Video Game Cartridge, 1988–1993,” in
Sara M. Grimes, “Little Big Scene,”
Hiro Izushi and Yuko Aoyama, “Industry Evolution and Cross-Sectoral Skill Transfers: A Comparative Analysis of the Video Game Industry in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom,”
Dmitri Williams, “Structure and Competition in the U.S. Home Video Game Industry,”
Denise Tsang, “Innovation in the British Video Game Industry since 1978,”
John Banks and Stuart Cunningham, “Creative Destruction in the Australian Videogames Industry,”
Felan Parker and Jen Jenson “Canadian Indie Games Between the Global and the Local,”
Akinori Nakamura and Hanna Wirman, “The Development of Greater China’s Games Industry: From Copying to Imitation to Innovation,” in
Mahsuum Daiiani and Brendan Keogh, “An Iranian Videogame Industry? Localizing Videogame Production Beyond The ‘Global’ Videogame Industry,”
Aphra Kerr and Anthony Cawley, “The Spatialisation of the Digital Games Industry: Lessons from Ireland,”
Anna Ozimek, “Construction and Negotiation of Entrepreneurial Subjectivities in the Polish Video Game Industry,” in
Dal Yin Jin and Florence Chee, “Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry,”
David B. Nieborg and Jereon de Kloet, “A Patchwork of Potential: A Survey of the European Game Industry,” in
Kristine Jørgensen, Ulf Sandqvist and Olli Sotamaa, “From Hobbyists to Entrepreneurs: On the Formation of the Nordic Game Industry,”
Orlando Guevara-Villalobos, “Playful Peripheries: The Consolidation of Independent Game Production in Latin America,” in
Rebecca Yvonne Bayeck, “The Emerging African Video Game Industry: An Analysis of the Narratives of Games Developed in Cameroon and Nigeria,” in
David Grandadam, Patrick Cohendet and Laurent Simon, “Places, Spaces and the Dynamics of Creativity: The Video Game Industry in Montreal,”
Patrick Cohendet, David Grandadam, Chahira Mehouachi and Laurent Simon, “The Local, the Global and the Industry Common: The Case of the Video Game Industry,”
Olli Sotomaa, “Modes of Independence in the Finnish Game Development Scene,” in
Felan Parker, Jennifer R. Whitson and Bart Simon, “Megabooth: The Cultural Intermediation of Indie Games,”
John Vanderhoef, “The Rebels Across the Street: IndiE3 and the Strategic Geography of Indie Game Promotion,” in
María Luján Oulton, “The Nuances of Video Game Curation: Lessons from Argentina,” in
Brendan Keogh, “The Melbourne Indie Game Scenes: Value Regimes in Localized Game Development,” in
David Hesmondhalgh,
Chris J. Young, “Scene Tracing: The Replication and Transformation of Global Industry, Movements, and Genres in Local Game Production,”