Hobbyist Game Making Between Self-Exploitation and Self-Emancipation

Abstract

Critics of both the game industry specifically and the cultural industries broadly have long drawn attention to how romantic ideals around creative and passionate work are exploited by cultural firms. Long hours, periods of contingent employment, and expectations of unpaid labour are all justified as the sacrifices that cultural workers make in order to ‘do what they love’. Drawing from interviews with 200 amateur game makers, a range of complex, and sometimes contradictory justifications of self-exploitation are identified. While some game makers speak of ambitions to one day get paid to make games, many others justify keeping their creative work separate from what they do for money as a form of self-emancipation.

Fright, attention, and joy while killing zombies in Virtual Reality: A psychophysiological analysis of VR user experience

“…Selection of gameplay modes was determined by using a play‐through methodology adopted from humanities, screen arts, and game design research (for a review, see Keogh, 2013; Bender, 2017). On the basis of the theoretical construct of immersion presented above, the study determined that the VR experience chosen as stimulus material should present varied audio‐visual and game‐play differentiation as practically possible.…”

“…On the basis of the theoretical construct of immersion presented above, the study determined that the VR experience chosen as stimulus material should present varied audio‐visual and game‐play differentiation as practically possible. Thus, using play‐through methodology (Keogh, 2013) and considering game design principles, a selection of five horror‐themed VR titles were explored: Arizona Sunshine from Vertigo Games, Survival VR from Newsight Games, HordeZ from Zenz VR, and The Brookehaven Experiment from Phosphor Games. It was ultimately decided by a set of experts that Arizona Sunshine offered the greatest variety of gameplay scenarios, audio‐visual elements, while also presenting the most user‐friendly entry‐level difficulty in terms of learning the VR controls for bodily movement through the virtual world and reloading weapons.…”

Harsh Noise Industrial Games : À propos d’une pratique artistique industrielle du jeu vidéo

“…Selon Jesper Juul, il serait risqué d'attribuer au jeu vidéo le statut d'art, car celui-ci limiterait la possibilité d'en faire un gagne-pain (Juul, 2019, p. 28). Deux textes provenant de l'ouvrage collectif Game Production Studies s'interrogent sur la façon dont les « everyday game maker » ou les « videogame zinester » (Keogh, 2021, p. 30), ceux qui produisent des jeux par plaisir, peuvent eux-mêmes être inféodés à une culture néolibérale du travail ou du post-travail (Keogh, 2021 ;Chia, 2021). Mais comme le souligne Keogh :…”