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:
Whitson, Jennifer R, Simon, Bart, & Parker Felan. (in submission). “Rethinking Cultural Production: Entrepreneurship, Relational Labour and Sustainability”. European Journal of Cultural Studies. Review version
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.
Jennifer R. Whitson 