O’Donnell, Casey. 2009. “The Everyday Lives of Videogame Developers: Experimentally Understanding Underlying Systems/Structures.” Transformative Works and Cultures 2

The editors and reviewers at TWC were excellent and I’d recommend that other scholars of new media look at it as a venue. I was quite impressed with their process. They have also really mastered OJS, the Open Journal System. Between reviewing for New Media and Society and working with TWC, I’ve gained a lot of insight into using it and am now trying to mobilize that for Cultural Anthropology. TWC is an Open Access journal, so for numerous reasons I really appreciate what they’re doing.

There have been a few folks who have commented on it and I really appreciate the email feedback that I’ve gotten thus far. When you send these things out into the aether-web, you never know if anyone reads them or how they find them. A couple of other blog posts out there have mentioned the collection and my essay in different ways. Here are some of the spots that have noted the special issue thus far:

• Mark “Danger” Chen who has an essay in the issue.
• Sergio Santos, who is a Portuguese Game Developer.
• The folks over at Preserving Virtual Worlds.
• Slashdot via Deepa Sivarajan.

I have also been thinking about my childhood, growing up as a moderate gamer who went on to be both part of the videogame industry, but also that academic industry that now generates people capable of thinking critically about and creating videogames. Seems like those aspects of the industry that encouraged me to pursue work in the videogame industry might have influenced others to do so as well.

One of those experiences was riding my bike to the video rental store where if I rented a game on Friday afternoon, I could keep it until Sunday morning. For a working class family without a lot of money, $4.00 for a weekend of fun was much more manageable than $40-50 for a game that I may or may not play for more than a weekend. My friends and I also took games over to one another’s houses. It was a chance to see different games and play them for a short while. It was also an opportunity to perhaps demonstrate how far you had progressed in a game.

Now, here I am in 2009, thinking about all of those Wii-ware games and Xbox Live Arcade games that I have downloaded to my consoles. None of these games are sharable. I couldn’t take an SD card over to a friends house and show them how great Lost Winds is. I could take my Wii over, which doesn’t seem so daunting, but dragging a bulky Xbox 360 or PS3 seems another story. Not to mention that it just doesn’t make that much sense. Of course I understand that with digital distribution comes the possibility of piracy, but what I’m talking about isn’t that. It is a shared gaming experience of gaming with others.

Rentals become even more problematic. Presumably digital distribution means reduced costs and an opportunity for developers to sell games for less and sell more. I understand that many developers see videogame rentals as lost revenue, but that really isn’t true. As a kid, I COULDN’T have bought any of those games. Perhaps instead my parents would have given me $4.00 per week to save for a new game. This would have meant that I could play 5-6 games per year instead of many. Playing all of those games gave me the background and vocabulary to be a game developer. Not having it would have meant my trajectory would have been very different.

So while I read articles saying that, “Digital content is the fastest-growing portion of the videogame industry,” I have to wonder what the consequences of that will be ultimately.

So I guess part of the answer is that my Mac, unlike my iPhone does not require a specific digital distribution method. I can download as many applications as I like from the Internet. I can purchase them through individual websites. My applications can update themselves through built-in automatic update features. But it just feels different. There is something appealing to having those updates brought to my attention regardless of if I open an application. I can use my existing iTunes account to make payments or purchase new software.

So while it might not be all that necessary, I do wonder why Apple hasn’t done something like this? There is an appeal to it that I can’t quite put my finger on.