Search

It is now widely accepted that videogames are a cultural form, and that they generate cultural meaning through the possibilities and constraints through which they shape players’ experiences and choices. However, the cultural processes through which videogames are themselves produced remain understudied and too-straightforwardly imagined. The videogame maker does not simply conceive of a videogame idea and then execute it. Instead, the videogame is produced through processes of negotiation and iteration between videogame maker, software and hardware environments and the broader expectations of the field. In this sense, videogame production can be fruitfully understood through the lens of craft. I argue that in order to politicise agency in digital play, as is this special issue’s goal, videogame research must also consider the agency of the videogame maker, and the iterative, embodied, and social processes through which videogames are produced. This article draws from interviews with videogame makers and existing research on craft production to provide a preliminary consideration of how the agency of the videogame maker as a cultural producer can be accounted for.

Videogame researchers have long considered the role videogames play in different cultural, social, and political contexts around the world. However, when it comes to researching videogame production, literature on the nominally global videogame industry has primarily focused on the dominant sites of North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. In this article, we argue that entrenched conceptualizations of the global videogame industry risk applying Westerncentric models of success and growth that fail to account for how videogame industries emerge from the interplay of global distribution and local conditions. We contribute to a growing body of scholarship that strives to localize videogame production cultures through an analysis of how Iranian videogame developers navigate local cultural, economic, and regulatory contexts alongside global markets, platforms, and genres. By outlining the formative ambivalence with which Iranian developers engage both with and against the “global” videogame industry, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for different local (and translocal) videogame production cultures mediated by global enterprise.

INTRODUCTION: A new smartphone app (QUT Inspire) has been developed to detect inspiratory sound and deliver virtual incentive spirometry (ISy), a respiratory therapy technique used in postoperative recuperation, management of some chronic conditions and with potential applications in SARS-CoV-2 rehabilitation. The aim of this study was to compare the usability of this new app with a clinical ISy device as measured by effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. METHODS: In this mixed-methods randomised usability study, healthy volunteers (aged 39.2±12.2 years, n=24) compared inspirations using the QUT Inspire app and a Triflo II clinical ISy device. A post-test questionnaire and a semi-structured interview explored dimensions of usability regarding the new app. RESULTS: The duration of inspirations performed using the QUT Inspire app (7.3±2.0 s) were comparable with use of the Triflo II ISy device (7.5±2.3 s). No artefacts arising from the order of device testing were identified. App users held their phones adjacent but not proximal to their mouths (13.6±6.4 cm), notwithstanding instructions to keep the phone less than 5 cm away for optimal breath sound detection. The use of onscreen text or video instructional materials did not result in a significant reduction in this distance. Participants reported clear preferences for the app (100%, n=24) to motivate persistence with repeated inspirations. App gamification features such as a timer (75%, n=18) and breath counter (83.3%, n=20) were well regarded. Analysis of semi-structured interviews identified four main themes arising from this study: visual reward from responsive app animations, clinical look and feel influencing credibility, perceived effort affecting engagement and selective adoption of gamification features. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that a virtual ISy app can be effective, efficient and have high satisfaction. Improvements informed by this research include use of additional phone sensors to opt

The games industry has seen a burst of new interest in the prospect of unionization. The efforts of organizations like Game Workers Unite have attracted much favorable coverage in the enthusiast and trade industry press, increasing awareness amongst videogame audiences of the difficult working conditions facing professional game developers. However, often missing from these discussions is an articulation of what unionization would look like for the significant number of game developers working in precarious conditions in small, often informal teams. The fragmented nature of contemporary gamework presents challenges in aggregating worker power similar to those found in other fields of creative or precarious work and entrepreneurial careers, where contingent work is typically organized around piecemeal, project–based funding arrangements. In this paper we draw from empirical research with Australian game developers to identify a number of barriers to unionization posed by small-scale game production. We also identify how within these same circumstances, novel and alternative forms of solidarity and collective action are beginning to emerge. The article ultimately argues that any successful attempt to unionize videogame workers will need to both account for, and take advantage of, the complex situation of small-scale videogame production in local contexts.

This chapter draws from over 40 interviews conducted with Australian videogame makers based in the state capital of Victoria, Melbourne – where a combination of established skills, state funding, and cultural support have birthed a rich and dynamic game development environment – to highlight the tensions, experiences, skills, ambitions, and identities at play in localized videogame development. Through these interviews, a multitude interlocking indie videogame scenes are identified to exist in Melbourne, each with its own practices, intermediaries, and values. One of these scenes prioritize building sustainable companies and producing commercially viable indie videogames, while the other is constituted primarily by videogame makers who receive their primary income from other means. However, as this chapter shows, this is more complicated than a simple ‘art vs commerce’ divide. Instead, across these two distinct but interconnected indie scenes, different value regimes of indie-ness are at play that produce complex and ambivalent relationships to labor, markets, and aesthetics. Through its analysis of these scenes, this chapter builds a more complex, contested, and localized notion of what it means to be an ‘indie’ developer.

Since the mid-2000s saw runaway videogame successes created beyond the traditional studio paradigm, ‘indie games’ have received increased attention from distributors, console manufactures, documentary makers, festival organizers, and, crucially, a new generation of game makers looking for alternative career trajectories. However, very few indie games are commercially successful, and even fewer are followed up with a second commercial success. In this chapter, we draw from ethnographic research with Australian video game developers to unpack the myriad challenges indie game developers grapple with as they strive for sustainability. Many developers, despite deploying the language of tech start-up culture, were less interested in ‘growth’ and ‘profijit’ than they were in simply being able to keep the team together to make the next game.

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 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.

Background: Clinically valid and reliable simulated inspiratory sounds were required for the development and evaluation of a new therapeutic respiratory exergame application (i.e., QUT Inspire). This smartphone application virtualises incentive spirometry, a longstanding respiratory therapy technique. Objectives: Inspiratory flows were simulated using a 3 litre calibration syringe and validated using clinical reference devices. Syringe flow nozzles of decreasing diameter were applied to model the influence of mouth shape on audible sound levels generated. Methods: A library of calibrated audio inspiratory sounds was created to determine the reliability and range of inspiratory sound detection at increasing distances separating the sound source and smartphones running the app. Results: Simulated inspiratory sounds were reliably detected by the new application at higher air inflows (high, medium), using smaller mouth diameters (<25 mm) and where smartphones were held proximal (≤5 cm) to the mouth (or at distances up to 50 cm for higher airflows). Performance was comparable for popular smartphone types and using different phone orientations (i.e., held horizontally, at 45° or 90°). Conclusions: These observations inform future application refinements, including prompts to reduce mouth diameter, increase inspiratory flow and maintain proximity to the phone to optimise sound detection. This library of calibrated inspiratory sounds offers reproducible non-human reference data suitable for development, evaluation and regression testing of a therapeutic respiratory exergame application for smartphones.

Beyond the blockbuster studios and multinational publishers of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, videogame production happens in a range of contexts, at a variety of scales, and for a number of reasons. While “the videogame industry” as a sector of the economy accounts for the flow of capital between corporate actors and global markets, as a concept it is insufficient to account for the spectrum of cultural activities and identities that constitute videogame production. In this article, I instead follow Bourdieu to consider videogame production as a cultural field. The videogame field is locally situated and constituted by a contested range of activities and identities implicated in interrelated economic, cultural, and social forces. Drawing from empirical research with videogame makers in Australia, this article’s conceptualization of the videogame field provides ways to better account for the plurality of ways videogames makers navigate economic stability and creative autonomy.

This workshop seeks to bring together key researchers in the emerging subfield of game production studies to facilitate new conversations and collaborations that consider the processes, conditions, and identities through which videogames are produced. The last decade has seen the global videogame industry undergo seismic changes in terms of how videogames are produced and distributed. The rise of independent game development (Ruffino 2018); extensive platformisation (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Nicoll and Keogh 2019); newly accessible and transformative development tools (Harvey 2014); heightened focus on labour conditions and discrimination in development studios (Cote and Harris 2020; Bulut 2020); and other drastic changes have greatly restructured videogame development in specific local contexts. Today, videogames are just as likely to be developed in small and informal settings with shoestring budgets as they are in established large campus-sized studios run by multinational corporations (Kerr 2017; Keogh 2019). The changing nature of videogame production reflects broader shifts towards individualisation and informalisation in the creative or cultural industries (Banks 2007; McRobbie 2016), and raises challenging questions in terms of how we investigate and conceptualise key concepts in game production studies such as labour, platformisation, craft, inclusion, precarisation, creativity, community, and education. Game production researchers have begun to fruitfully explore these conditions through a range of approaches including political economy, ethnography, labour studies, platform governance, history, and cultural industries. A constant refrain across this burgeoning body of research is a recognition of the need for new concepts and theories on the skills, cultures, and politics of making videogames in specific local and trans-local contexts (Izushi and Aoyama 2006; Joseph 2013; Jørgensen et al 2017; Kerr 2017; Parker and Jenson 2017

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.

Incentive spirometry (ISy) is a longstanding respiratory therapy technique for clearing mucus from the airways to prevent respiratory complications such as chest infections or pneumonia. Slow gradual maximal inspirations are encouraged by levitation of spheres or a piston encased in a clear plastic ISy device as an ‘incentive’ to persist with repeated inhalations using an attached tube; such therapies are termed therapeutic exergames. The intent of ISy therapy is dislodgement of mucus from the airways and expulsion by coughing. Settings where ISy therapy is practiced include post-operative convalescence in hospital environments and in the management of chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in home and nursing home settings. ISy devices cost between AUD $20 and $50. At rest, normal breaths are almost silent. If one’s lips are pursed in preparation to whistle, vigorous inhalation produces an audible sound resulting from turbulence as air flows into the mouth. Smartphone mHealth apps have been developed to detect breath sounds in contexts such as respiratory function testing, cough analysis and coaching correct medication inhaler techniques for asthma and COPD sufferers. These apps often employ complex sound frequency analysis and may use spacer devices or calibrated whistles to optimise sound detection by smartphone microphones. The results of a recently conducted survey will be presented, regarding available mHealth apps using built-in sensors in curated international mHealth app libraries including the NHS App Library, AppScript and MyHealthApps, finding only 18 out of 1200 available apps used built-in smartphone sensors for diagnosis or therapy, with a paucity of respiratory therapy mHealth apps using phone sensors offered for health improvement. The World Health Organisation identify the need for more rigorous mHealth evaluation and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners cite a lack of evidence regardin

Background: Clinicians are cautious about embracing prescription of health and well-being (i.e., mHealth) smartphone apps to patients, citing a lack of evidence regarding safety, reliability and clinical validity as barriers to wider adoption. This doctoral research concerns a new mHealth app (QUT Inspire) which virtualises a longstanding respiratory therapy technique called Incentive Spirometry (i.e., ISy); this new app detects inspired breath using the phone microphone and displays responsive animated on-screen graphics to encourage effort and persistence with ISy therapy. Methodology: In this mixed methods research, a systematic survey of curated (i.e., trusted) health app libraries was conducted to assess availability of “prescribable” smartphone mHealth apps using built-in phone sensors. The technical validity and reliability of the new QUT Inspire app was assessed in non-human quantitative bench testing studies, using mechanical and acoustic simulations of inspiration. Human studies in disease-free subjects will commence in early 2021 to evaluate QUT Inspire performance compared with existing clinical ISy devices, in addition to semi-structured interviews with participants to assess the utility of interface design enhancements such as gamification features. Results/Expected Results: A paucity of “trusted” mHealth apps using built-in phone sensors (n=18) was identified in a systematic survey conducted in late 2019 (Baxter et. al., 2020). Bench testing of the new QUT Inspire app yielded insights into factors contributing to app performance (in press). These included optimal mouth diameter, flow rate and spacing between user and phone for optimal sound detection. It is hoped that human studies will inform interface and gamification refinements to the new app, to improve usability. Conclusion: This research contributes original knowledge in the fields of smartphone mHealth app development, evaluation and interface refin

Background: The 2.7 billion or more smartphone users worldwide possess devices with multiple built-in sensors which may be amenable to generating valuable data to improve health. Over 500 million smartphone users have downloaded one or more “health” app. Recent reviews highlight a paucity of evidence as to the efficacy and safety of an estimated 300,000 mobile health (mHealth) apps available today which may be potentially prescribable by clinicians to patients. This lack of evidence may be a barrier to wider adoption of such technology by clinicians. Techniques for the performance validation and evaluation of two new bespoke mHealth apps are the focus of this research. Methodology: A virtual respiratory therapy app called QUT Inspire has been developed, using the smartphone microphone as an uncalibrated pressure sensor to detect and display inspiratory effort graphically on screen, encouraging maximal inhalation to prevent respiratory complications. A clinical photography app called QUT Clin Pics uses recent advances in augmented reality (AR) to perform measurements on pictures derived from the phone camera. In addition to non-human bench testing against reference methods, the performance of these new apps will be evaluated using disease-free cohorts and prospective randomised controlled trials. Expected Results: Performance validation of these new mHealth apps will be compared on popular smartphone platforms for cross-platform compatibility. Feedback from testing with healthy users will inform refinement of the apps, including motivational features such as gamification to improve compliance. Efficacy and safety will be assessed in clinically relevant cohorts (pending ethics committee approval). Conclusions: Following inception in 1992, smartphone ownership is now near ubiquitous. These sensor-rich devices and apps offer great potential as adjuncts to clinical practice. Acceptance and implementation of potentially prescribable mHealth app

Like other pop-cultural forms, videogames commonly reify militarist representations of warfare as straightforward, precise, and moral by obscuring conflict’s embodied messiness. But videogames do not just reflect militarist interests in their content; they are materially, symbiotically entangled with militarist interests. Recognising this intimate connection, and the phenomenon of virtuous warfare that results, this paper takes videogames seriously as material cultural artefacts. This paper draws on feminist IR, critical military studies, and game studies to explore three categories of bodies, and their gendered logics, produced by virtualised warfare: the hypermasculine, technologised soldier; the oft-ignored broken bodies of the soldier and game developer; and the obfuscated civilian. Together, this analysis argues that the consumption and production of videogames benefits certain parties, in ways that are reproduced and sustained through the production and obfuscation of bodies. Such entanglements have real consequences for how war, and its popular culture production, is understood and imagined.

Published in 1983, David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld performs an autoethnographic analysis of videogames that details how he acquires the gestures and postures required by skilled videogame play. While often seen as a curious experiment in early videogame analysis, Sudnow points to a descriptive mode of evaluating videogames that sees the audiovisual and mechanic aspects as irreducibly constituting a holistic embodied experience of the videogame as played. This article highlights the interventions that Sudnow’s under-examined work can provide contemporary critical videogame scholarship to account for how videogames meaningfully fuse embodied gestures with audiovisual spectacle. At a time when scholars are paying increased attention to the embodied aspects of videogame play, this article argues that Sudnow provides a unique opportunity to re-evaluate the expressive potential of videogames as not just ‘digital games’ nor as ‘computer toys’ but as performed, haptically augmented audiovisual media.

Beyond the dominant North American and Japanese console manufacturers and multinational publishers, the global videogame industry is fragmenting. New audiences, distribution platforms, and development tools are expanding the videogame industry into an ecosystem that is at once broadly global and intensely localised. Taking advantage of this nebulous environment are increasingly visible fringes of hobbyists, amateurs, students, and artists that are pushing videogame development in new directions in terms of aesthetics, design process, and distribution channels. The activities of these fringe creators represent a critical but undertheorised aspect of the videogame industry. This article builds on Lobato and Thomas’s notion of ‘informal media economies’ to suggest that the work of these fringes can be usefully considered as informal videogame development practices. It provides a historical look at the videogame industry that demonstrates how it transitioned from a period of aggressive formalisation through the 1980s to the early 2000s into a more intense intermingling of formal and informal actors and processes in the early 2010s. In doing so, this article traces the shifting conduits of creative practice, commerce, and power that these emerging informal practices represent so as to more fully account for the contemporary global videogame industry.