Author: jenniferwhitson

Parker, Felan, Whitson, Jennifer R, and Simon, Bart. “Megabooth: The cultural intermediation of indie games”. New Media and Society. Online first: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444817711403

Abstract:

This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders in terms of their role as a ‘cultural intermediary’ in promoting and supporting independent or ‘indie’ game development. The Megabooth is a crucial broker, gatekeeper and orchestrator of not only perceptions of and markets for indie games but also the socio-material possibility of indie game making itself. In its highly publicized outward-facing role, the Megabooth ascribes legitimacy and value to specific games and developers, but its behind-the-scenes logistical and brokerage activities are of equal if not greater importance. The Megabooth mediates between a diverse set of actors and stakeholders with multiple (often conflicting) needs and goals and in doing so helps constitute the field of production, distribution, reception and consumption for indie games. ‘Indie-ness’ and independence are actively performed in and through intermediaries such as the Megabooth.

I’m working on the Indie Interfaces project with Dr. Bart Simon and Dr. Felan Parker. We are collaborating with indie developers and the IndieMEGABOOTH, a game developer organization in an action-research project to foster greater diversity in indie games development as well as to collect and share empirical data on what it means to be “sustainable”, both economically and culturally, in the game industry. On a theoretical level, we are re-theorizing the role of cultural intermediaries in creative industries in terms of their influence on new modes of political economic organization that are focused on sustainability rather than the traditional binary of artistic distinction versus capital accumulation.

Our first publications for the project can be found here: Parker, Felan, Whitson, Jennifer R. & Simon, Bart. (2018). “Megabooth: The cultural intermediation of indie games”. New Media & Society. online first in 2017. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817711403.

Very rarely, I have time to actually blog.  When I do, it’s at Gamasutra.  You can find my posts here.

If you’re interested in reading more work on game design issues on Gamasutra, I recommend reading Tanya X. Short’s blog.  She’s the founder of Kitfox Games, a truly great game designer, a talented public speaker, a research collaborator, and the co-founder of the Pixelles game-making initiative in Montreal.

I’m an associate editor of the journal, Surveillance & Society and much of my research examines how the ability to monitor and surveil software users changes production practices and economic models behind new media such as games.

With my graduate student, Brian Schram, I am currently working on a project rethinking social networks and surveillance. Notions of privacy coalesce around an individual’s right to privacy, largely centering on one’s autonomy over their information, and the protection from corporate and government surveillance. This project will theorize the how anonymity and privacy might be reconciled with the conditions of community formation and social organization that are predicated upon lateral surveillance.

Here is a selection of articles on the topic, ranging from identity theft to the Snowden Documents, to games.  For the complete listing, please check out my publication list.

game studies meets surveillance studies at the edge of digital culture

In this introduction to a special issue of Surveillance & Society, Bart Simon and I  tease apart some of the intersections of games and surveillance, beginning with a discussion of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden on using games to both monitor and influence unsuspecting populations. Next, we provide an overview of corporate data-gathering practices in games and further outline the production of manageable, computable subjectivities. Then, we show how the game Watch Dogs explores the surveillant capacities of games at both the game mechanical and representational scales. These three different facets of surveillance, games, and play set the scene for the special issue and the diverse articles that follow.  In the following pages we pose new lines of questioning that highlight the nuances of play and offer new modes of thinking about what games – and the processes of watching and being watched that are a foundational part of the experience – can tell us about surveillance.

You can read the whole article here.

gaming the quantified self

By their nature, digital games facilitate surveillance. They allow for the compilation of statistics, internal states, and rules to be recorded, thus hiding many of the internal workings from the players and making the games much more complex. This digitization makes it much easier to collect player data and metrics, and then, as a process of function creep, to use this data in new and innovative ways, such as improving the user experience, or subtly shaping users’ in-game desires and behaviours. Increasingly, these practices have moved from non-game spaces into social networking sites and spaces of play.

Find the extended abstract, and the link to the entire article here.

identity theft and the care of the virtual self

Written at the very cusp of the identity theft panic, in this paper Kevin Haggerty and I analyse how major institutions publicly respond to the crime of identity theft.

The paper concentrates on how individuals are encouraged to responsibilize themselves against this potentiality, and what they should do in the event they are victimized. These two distinct discourses (prevention and victimization) aim to fashion a hyper-vigilant citizen whose daily routines, home environment, consumption patterns and sense of self are being brought into accord with wider power dynamics. These measures can be understood as encouraging a care of the virtual self a wider social project characteristic of an informational age that encourages individuals to reduce the risks and maximize the potentialities related to their data double. In the context of identity theft, however, institutionally promoted methods for the care for the virtual self transcend what is reasonably practicable for most citizens and mask the role played by major institutions in fostering the preconditions for identity theft.

Drop me an email if you can’t access the paper, as it’s one of my only ones behind a paywall (which I hate).

special issue of the journal surveillance & society on games, Play & surveillance

Bart Simon and I put together an edited collection of open-access works that look at the use of surveillance in games.  We’re quite happy with how it turned out, especially with the range of scholarship.  I found that the opinion articles and research notes, in particular, go far beyond quick postscripts and are well worth a read.

Editorial

Game Studies meets Surveillance Studies at the Edge of Digital Culture: An Introduction to a special issue on Surveillance, Games and Play Jennifer R. Whitson, Bart Simon

PDF 309-319

Articles

Surveillant Assemblages of Governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A Comparative Analysis Aphra Kerr, Stefano De Paoli, Max Keatinge

PDF 320-336

Surveillance and Community: Language Policing and Empowerment in a World of Warcraft Guild Lauren B. Collister

PDF 337-348

Getting Played: Gamification and the Rise of Algorithmic Surveillance Casey O’Donnell

PDF 349-359

Games of Drones: The Uneasy Future of the Soldier-Hero in Call of Duty: Black Ops II Carrie Elizabeth Andersen

PDF 360-376

Creative Misuse as Resistance: Surveillance, Mobile Technologies, and Locative Games Jason Farman

PDF 377-388

The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Google, Ingress, and the Gift of Surveillance Nathan Hulsey, Joshua Reeves

PDF 389-400

‘I had no credit to ring you back’: Children’s strategies of negotiation and resistance to parental surveillance via mobile phones Carol Margaret Barron

PDF 401-413

Gaming Privacy: a Canadian case study of a children’s co-created privacy literacy game Kate Raynes-Goldie, Matthew Allen

PDF 414-426

Opinion

Enclosures at Play: Surveillance in the Code and Culture of Videogames Alex Dean Cybulski

PDF 427-432

Reporting From the Snooping Trenches: Changes in Attitudes and Perceptions Towards Behavior Tracking in Digital Games Alessandro Canossa

PDF 433-436

Watching Us Play: Postures and Platforms of Live Streaming Austin Walker

PDF 437-442

Diverting and diverted glances at cameras: playful and tactical approaches to surveillance studies Justine Gangneux

PDF 443-447

Research Notes

Playdates with Big Brother: Playfully Repurposing Surveillance Cameras to Build Communities Holly Robbins, Katherine Isbister

PDF 448-458

Artistic Presentations

Surveillance Chess !Mediengruppe Bitnik

 

 

Ethnographies of game development

A lot of my writing revolves around the “work of making play”.  In general, I’m fascinated by the people who create the software and hardware that we take for granted – from the user interfaces on our smartphones to the options on our productivity software, to the privacy settings of Facebook.  I also love games.

So, it made sense to not only play games, and read about game development processes, but to actually start researching how games are made, the people who make them, and the “soft and squishy” social aspects of creating culture. I call this work “Studio Studies”, which is also a big part of the work of other researchers like John Banks, Casey O’Donnell, Olli Sotamma, and Aphra Kerr.

I began small: starting with interviews of game developers, then moving to short embedded ethnographies during the summers (see Voodoo Software), and from November 2012 to November 2014 I was fortunate enough to carry out an extended embedded ethnography of Execution Labs, a first-of-its-kind launching pad for independent game studios.  There, I was able to work with a number of development teams and really understand the struggles and success of working in the game industry.

I’m currently working on a book that details some of these experiences.