This article explores the evolution of video game updates and patches from a mechanism of customer support to a tool of control over the way games are played in the ecosystem of digital gaming platforms. It charts a historical trajectory across various cultural industries, including literary publishing, screen industries, and music, to show a shift from multiplicity of editions to one perpetually updated contingent commodity. Focusing on the issues of power and control enabled by the always-online platforms, the analysis shows that previously updating was often voluntary. However, now players must actively resist patches if they wish to play the game on their own terms. As illustrated by three case studies of update resistance, developers, publishers, and platform holders wield protocological power, which can be successfully opposed -although the outcome often remains localized and tends to alter a specific iteration of protocol and not the underlying infrastructure.
Magic: The Gathering is a household name among analog games. Its publisher, Wizards of the Coast, has experimented with digital adaptations since the late 1990s, however, it was only in 2018–2019 when the company announced a more radical push for the video game market, including a strategy for streaming and esports. By analyzing streaming content, paratextual elements, and online discussions leading up to the first major digital tournament, I explore the attempted and heavily promoted transition of Magic: The Gathering from a primarily analog card game toward a transmedia esports property. Beside conflicting reactions from players and fans to particular aspects of this transformation, this change brings along deepened mediatization of the game as a way to improve the spectator experience by following the media logics of streaming and esports. Professional players in the newly formed esports league along with other sponsored content creators were recruited to serve as advocates for this transition.
Video game voice acting does not rank among the core roles of video game production, yet actors in leading roles sometimes achieve wide recognition despite their contingent employment. In this article, we explore the role of voice actors in the video game culture using the specific case of the recasting of the video game series Life Is Strange, which was caused by the 2016 to 2017 SAG-AFTRA strike against video game companies. Our qualitative empirical analysis of journalistic coverage (including interviews with voice actors), promotional materials, press releases, and player discussions reconstructs the events of the game’s production and investigates the reception of the recasting with regard to actor-character identification and to labor conditions of voice actors. We find that voice actors, whose status is partly dependent on the popularity of their characters, attempt to rise “above the line” by engaging in relational labor.
With the help of screenshots, human and nonhuman actors alike document their professional and leisure encounters with screen-based technologies. In this article, I investigate how and why screenshots have come to be understood as faithful visual records of digital culture. By tracing screenshot’s origins to photographic techniques used for capturing medical imaging, oscillograms, and first applications of computer-aided design, I show a lineage of a straightforward mode of representation built on the assumptions of indexicality and iconic resemblance. However, this initially mechanical act of image reproduction has given rise to transformative practices of promotional and artistic screenshots (represented in this article by in-game photography), which subvert the conventions of accurate representation. By contrasting these visual phenomena, I argue for the redefinition of screenshot and show the need for critical literacy of screenshot-based images.
In the introduction, the editors of this collection argue for the importance of game production studies at a point when the public awareness about the production context of video games has, arguably, never been higher. With so many accounts of video game development permeating player and developer communities, the task of game production studies is to uncover the economic, cultural, and political structures that influence the final form of games by applying rigorous research methods. While the field of game studies has developed quickly in the past two decades, the study of the video game industry and different modes of video game production have been mostly dismissed by game studies scholars and requires more attention.
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