This article examines how the process of platformisation is manifesting in videogame development. Rather than reinforcing a top-down perspective of platformisation centred on distribution platforms like app stores, we focus on often overlooked game-making tools and the independent, entrepreneurial, and fringe communities that govern and use them. We draw on case studies of Unity and Twine, two such tools that have transformed videogame creation and distribution. By considering how they complicate existing understandings and definitions of both 'platform' and 'platformisation' , we move beyond reductive narratives that frame platformisation as a fixed, hegemonic process. Instead, we reveal a much more ambiguous and complex relationship between game makers and the platforms they use. Issue 4This paper is part of Trust in the system, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guestedited by Péter Mezei and Andreea Verteş-Olteanu.

The desire to “do what you love” energizes employment and engagement in creative industries such as digital gaming yet drains hobbyists and aspirants by normalizing expectations to sacrifice job security for passionate work. This article investigates how individuals regulate their aspirations through taken-for-granted trade-offs between vocational compromise and compensation. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with players at fan conventions and recruitment events in North America suggests a moral calculus of corruption and sublimation between passion and profit, which can be traced back to industrialization’s cleavage of labor from recreation and its institution of hobbies as productive leisure. Building on existing research about waged labor’s imagined denigration of hobbies, this argument juxtaposes the passion that is corruptible by work and the passion that promises to sublimate work from drudgery. Interrogating this confounding logic cultivates counter-narratives for purposeful livelihoods beyond industrial-era notions of productivity and neoliberal notions of passion.

The needs and desires to disconnect, detox, and log out have been turned into commodities and found their expressions in detox camps, self-help books, and “offline” branded apparel. Disconnection studies have challenged the power of commodified disconnective practices to create real social change. In this article, we build on the notion of affective attunement to explore how disconnection commodities provide differential ways for individuals to respond to the challenges of connectivity, and how they can form larger patterns of resistance that cannot be dismissed as futile. We examine the ambiguity of disconnection commodities through three examples: a smartwatch kill switch and stealth mode features, detox floatation tank therapy, and make-up lines. Our approach turns the perspective from ends to the means of disconnection. We argue that these commodities do not offer hard breaks but they do let users attune to connectivity.

This article uses a discursive analysis of personal blogging handbooks and personal blogs to reflect on the politics of user-generated content (UGC) as it is created, circulated, valuated, quantified, and monetized by different social media platforms. In doing so, this article traces the contours of an increasingly commercialized blogosphere and the tensions and perceived trade-offs that ensue for professional and quotidian bloggers. By reconstructing the ecology of platforms that form the sociotechnical machinery of the blogosphere, the rifts between the empowerment rhetoric of Web 2.0 and the statistical and experiential realities faced by quotidian bloggers become palpable. Suspended between a vibrant vision of blogging as a surefire ticket to fame and fortune and a sobering structural reality of obscurity and tedium, bloggers are recalibrating their collective delusions of grandeur by constructing alternative economies of exchange. Instead of valuating their self-professed labor monetarily or quantitatively, bloggers are reverting to more attainable small-scale social exchanges that are qualitative in form. More than hits, links, and votes, bloggers appear to value a virtual pat on the back, a reassuring remark, a sincere conversation. However, as the machinery of the blogosphere chugs on, the sociotechnical biases of its architectures of participation will be increasingly unable to cater to these bloggers’ needs. This article demonstrates how the politics of UGC can illuminate the infectious rhetoric of Web 2.0, situate the enterprise of blogging within the socioeconomic logic of prosumption, and pave the way toward a better understanding of our communal media futures.

No abstract

Conspirituality refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. Conspirituality has thrived online: between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the QAnon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as Q puts it, “future proves past.” This panel traces forms of conspirituality from MAGA mystics to New Age influencers, from technolibertarian imageboards to Silicon Valley vision quests. While conspirituality marks an online psychographic segmentation, it also traces a formal quality that organizes ways of navigating, knowing, and critiquing the internet, which is undergirded by New Age spirituality’s perennialism: a belief that different spiritual traditions are equally valid, because they all essentially worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos and the human body. The internet supercharges perennialism, providing a connective medium for New Age ideology of manifesting: the belief that we create our own reality. As users trawl the internet for snippets and statistics to feed their confirmation bias and populate their vision boards, the connective medium of the internet manifests toxicity and misinformation at scale. The papers in this panel develop a line of research on the coevolution of spirituality and technology from organized to new religious movements. Instead of demystification, we use ethnographic, textual, and hermeneutic approaches—examining internet users, governance, genealogies, and internet studies itself—to politicize networked conspirituality as vernacular theories of power and powerlessness.

The sandbox genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) addresses players as subjects with agency to shape worlds, impact populations, and make history through their actions within virtual environments. Designed features afford feelings of empowerment and solidarity that undergird technoliberal forms of subjectivity, which uphold technological structures as legitimate means to emergent effects in virtual worlds. This article uses ethnographic fieldwork and player interviews at EVE Online fan conventions to examine how the ideas and affects of technoliberalism are afforded through procedurally-encoded game processes, yet are aestheticized through branding onto player communities and their platforms. This smooths over the contradiction at the heart of technoliberalism that players’ agency to shape virtual world content is contingent on rules encoded into platforms whose development and adjustment are beyond their control. These contradictions are the key to understanding the pleasures of freedom and complexities of control in designed environments beyond gaming.

For over a decade, scholars have considered how digital play has converged with the work of media production. From esports and volunteer moderation to play-testing, the circuits of game production are accelerated by players’ passionate engagements as fans and hobbyists, which are intertwined with their professional ambitions to join the industry. It is now taken for granted in scholarly discourse that work and play, production and consumption, and professional and amateur identities are blurring. Researchers propose hybrid terms such as ‘prosumption’ or ‘playbour’ to capture the variation, complexity and contradictions in media participation and value creation across diverse fan practices. This analysis proposes that these post-Fordist neologisms oversimplify techno-cultural changes and legitimate ambiguities in fans’ relationships with media companies and their imperatives for productivism in platform capitalism and its gig economies. In contrast, hobbies have always been a mediating category of productive leisure that can be traced back to industrialization’s cleavage of labour from recreation. This article argues that charting how this liminal category of hobbies has been institutionalized in contemporary media practices provides an analytical lens to interrogate post-Fordist obligations of productivity and neo-liberal expectations of entrepreneurialism.