Identity and Interdisciplinarity in Games

and Play ResearchUtrecht University 2014

The Creative Territories Project Exploring Cultural Values of Indie Games Collaboration

Introductions

CroganDigital Cultures Research Centre

Helen KennedyUniversity of Brighton

Project partners: The Bristol Games Hub

Debbie Rawlings, Co-director; Principal of Auroch Digital

Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University

Josh JarrettPh D ResearcherDigital Cultures Research Centre

Network members Seth Giddings, Digital Cultures Research Centre

Daniel Ashton, Bath Spa University

Brian MacDonald, Scottish Game Jams, and Glasgow Caledonian University

Alex Darby, Arch Creatives, Leamington Spa, Co-founder

‘Creative Economy’

• Major focus of research today including for AHRC

• First funding stream dedicated to video games research had this emphasis from the Nesta ‘Next Gen’ report (2011) recommendation to:

support better research-oriented university/industry collaborations with a view to accelerating innovation and maintaining competitive advantage in the video games industry

Creativity ?• Often assumed, or missing in creative economy models

• Emphasis on economic, legal and infrastructural conditions

• Economy as quantitatively imagined: export revenue, job growth, UK’s ‘immaterial’ economy ‘brand’

• Cf Brighton Fuse Report: success = ‘fused’ companies with ICT /programming + Arts / Design trained members

• Cf NESTA Creative Clusters and Innovation (2010) report: … ‘value chain linkages and shared infrastructures’ , ‘digitisation’ and ‘digital revolution’ in internal R&D as major innovation driver

Creative Territories: To explore creativity in context

• Creativity as collectively enabled

• As cultural (as well as) economic value

• Multiple motivations: questions of value, ‘investment’, community identity, sustainable (not boom/bust)

Another way in….

‘Games and Technicity’ (2009)

• Games in context of wider technocultural dynamics

• As industrial technical forms

• New aesthetics, new possibilities + older questions, challenges of culture, society, politics

Bernard StieglerPhilosopher, cultural activist

Technicity: Human is ‘technical being’ co-evolved in dynamic with technical evolution

Eg. ‘Reading brain’ thesis (Maryanne Wolf); neural plasticity

Vital scientific, but also philosophical, political, economic, ethical etc insight

‘Programme Industries’

• central role of industrial media in globalisation, contemporary technocultural, economic developments

• Revised Adorno-Horkheimer cultural critique: homogenisation of experience, programming of desires, management of attention;

• ‘Proletarianisation’ of consumer (after the worker): our dependence on the messages, and the devices, on their default modes

Jonathan Crary:Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Today: Always on, 24/7 media

‘not only incites in the individual subject and exclusive focus on getting, having, winning, gawking, squandering, and deriding, but is fully interwoven with mechanisms of control that maintain the superfluousness and powerlessness of the subject of its demands (32).’

Stiegler• But industrial technologies, media, are only

means of improving situation, locally and globally

• Means of empowerment, de-proletarianization, • Eg. pc vs tablet; • or more substantially, the • Raspberry PI, Fablabs, etc

Indie games potentials

• small scale, independent model has potential to transform industrial production of mediated experience

• Diversify expression, ‘symbol-making’• New experiences, engagements• Critical, cultural shifters

Papers Please (Lucas Pope, 2013 )

Narcoguerra (Auroch, 2013)

Hubert Robert, Plan for the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, 1796

Copy-paste

Flappy Bird (Dong Nguyen, 2013)

‘Mindie’ trajectory:

Replication / Absorption

Cf Alistair Doulin, ‘Bridging the Gap Between Mainstream and Indie’ , http://www.doolwind.com/blog/mindie-bridging-the-gap-between-mainstream-and-indie/

Rovio Entertainment 2009 -

Game cultures issues• Eg. the Anita Saarkesian phenomenon

• Production context continuities with industrial/technology sectors, neoliberal workplaces, social media abuses, with mainstream patriarchal audiovisual media

Our interests

• co-location, creativity, collectivity and/vs global, immaterial notion of ‘the industry’

• Cultures of making and their transformative potential

• Technical, material, economic-political connections of indie game making

Contacts/comms

• Website creativeterritories.dcrc.org.uk

• Tweet to @CreativTurf ; #creativeterritories

• creativeterritories@gmail.com

Network (not only School)• Local research still wanted; you are part of the

network now

• You will be contributing today!

• Final Workshop in November at DCRC:• Includes Jen Jenson, Celia Pearse, Joost, and lots

more…

• Somefunding available…