Syllabus
Full and up-to-date syllabus, including course schedule and assignment instructions can be found here: syllabus JKM150 Live-Streaming and Content Creation in Game Culture 2023.docx
Main Themes:
Playthrough Videos and Live-Streaming
The so-called let’s plays and game live-streaming rank among the most popular types of content in game culture. As such, they impact how game industries operate but also by themselves represent a growing professional segment of game culture. As a commercial activity, live-streaming exhibits characteristics of other types of creator culture, including precarity and the demands for relational labor. In this thematic area, we will discuss the formal characteristics of playthrough video content as well as economic and labor conditions of creators. As a core and complex area of transformative content, this theme will be split into multiple sessions.
Gandolfi, Enrico. 2016. “To Watch or to Play, It Is in the Game: The Game Culture on Twitch.Tv among Performers, Plays and Audiences.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 8 (1): 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.8.1.63_1.
Gray, Kishonna L. 2017. “‘They’re Just Too Urban’: Black Gamers Streaming on Twitch.” In Digital Sociologies, edited by Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, 355–68. Bristol: Policy Press.
Johnson, Mark R., and Jamie Woodcock. 2019. “The Impacts of Live Streaming and Twitch.Tv on the Video Game Industry.” Media, Culture & Society 41 (5): 670–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818363.
Ruberg, Bonnie, Amanda L. L. Cullen, and Kathryn Brewster. 2019. “Nothing but a ‘Titty Streamer’: Legitimacy, Labor, and the Debate over Women’s Breasts in Video Game Live Streaming.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 36 (5): 466–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2019.1658886.
Taylor, T.L. 2018. Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. http://watchmeplay.cc/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/WatchMePlayCC.pdf
Uszkoreit, Lena. 2018. “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Video Game Live Streaming and Its Potential Risks and Benefits for Female Gamers.” In Feminism in Play, edited by Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen, 163–81. Cham: Springer.
Actual Play
Actual play represents an emerging category of gameplay as performance, albeit focused on analog games abd most notably tabletop role-playing. With commercial hits like Critical Role, actual play is entering the mainstream game and geek culture. Compared to video game live-streaming, the relationship between developers and players is different, giving the latter more freedom to create their own intellectual property on the basis of official game systems.
Chalk, Alex. 2022. “Mapping an Online Production Network: The Field of ‘Actual Play’ Media.” Convergence, May, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221103987.
Friedman, Emily C. 2021. “‘Is It Thursday yet?’ Narrative Time in a Live-Streamed Tabletop RPG.” In Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop RPGs and Fandom, edited by Stephanie Hedge and Jennifer Grouling, 187–206. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
White, William J. 2019. “Actual Play and the Laws of Media.” Analog Game Studies VI (2019 Role-Playing Game Summit). https://analoggamestudies.org/2019/12/actual-play-and-the-laws-of-media/.
Metagaming
Metagaming refers to diverse approaches to playing that transcend official rules and emerge in gaming communities. Metagaming covers phenomena such as competitive gaming, speedrunning, glitch hunting, trolling, theorycrafting, but also various systems of achievements and trophies. As a concept, metagaming is key for understanding esports.
Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. 2017. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Janik, Justyna. 2020. “Negotiating Textures of Digital Play: Gameplay and the Production of Space.” Game Studies 20 (4). http://gamestudies.org/2004/articles/janik.
Welsh, Timothy. 2020. “(Re)Mastering Dark Souls.” Game Studies 20 (4). http://gamestudies.org/2004/articles/welsh.
Esport
Competitive gaming dates back to the early days of the video game industry, but a more significant growth began in the 2000s with games like StarCraft a Counter-Strike. Currently, esports boasts a wide viewership and has made its way into college programs. Despite its symbolic connection to traditional sports, the role of video game companies and their control over the esports communities is important for understanding the unique qualities of esports, which is often criticized for poor working conditions and high precarity.
Borowy, Michael, and Dal Yong Jin. 2013. “Pioneering ESport: The Experience Economy and the Marketing of Early 1980s Arcade Gaming Contests.” International Journal of Communication 7 (0): 2254–74. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2296
Taylor, T.L. 2012. Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Witkowski, Emma. 2018. “Doing/Undoing Gender with the Girl Gamer in High-Performance Play.” In Feminism in Play, edited by Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen, 185–203. Palgrave Games in Context. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Fan Labor and Fan Wikis
Fans create a wealth of unofficial content, which can be exploited by game companies, but which can also breach copyright and threaten commercial interests. Drawing on the tradition of fan studies as well as political economy, we will explore game-related forms of fan-made cultural artifacts, including fan wikis. While these products of fan labor are not exclusive to game culture, video game developers have publicly admitted their usefulness for industry insiders. There are also several sites that bring together volunteers and game companies, such as Paradox Wikis, which cover strategy games from the eponymous Swedish publisher.
Chin, Bertha. 2014. “Sherlockology and Galactica.Tv: Fan Sites as Gifts or Exploited Labor?” Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (March). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0513.
Comerford, Chris, and Natalie Krikowa. 2022. “Archive-Lensing of Fan Franchise Histories: Chronicle, Guide, Catalyst.” Transformative Works and Cultures 37 (March). https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2095.
Jones, Shelly. 2021. “Actual Play Audience as Archive: Analyzing the Critical Role Fandom.” In Watch Us Roll: Essays on Actual Play and Performance in Tabletop Role-Playing Games, edited by Shelly Jones, 136–56. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Švelch, Jan, and Tereza Krobová. 2016. “Who Is the Note-Worthy Fan? Featuring Players in the Official Facebook Communication of Mainstream Video Games.” Replay. The Polish Journal of Game Studies 3 (1): 81–100. https://doi.org/10.18778/2391-8551.03.05.
Modding
Game mods expand and transform existing games in terms of new storylines, visuals, or rules, but are still reliant on the infrastructure of a given game. Modders can enhance games and add their own spin on them, this activity, however, can be regulated or outright rejected by game companies. Mods can also serves as prototypes for future commercial games and in this sense tie directly into industrial production of games (e.g. Auto Chess, Dota, or The Forgotten City).
Joseph, Daniel James. 2018. “The Discourse of Digital Dispossession: Paid Modifications and Community Crisis on Steam.” Games and Culture 13 (7): 690–707. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412018756488.
Kretzschmar, Mark, and Mel Stanfill. 2019. “Mods as Lightning Rods: A Typology of Video Game Mods, Intellectual Property, and Social Benefit/Harm.” Social & Legal Studies 28 (4): 517–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663918787221.
Postigo, Hector. 2008. “Video Game Appropriation through Modifications: Attitudes Concerning Intellectual Property among Modders and Fans.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (1): 59–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856507084419.
In-Game Photography and Screenshots
Screenshots first found use as visual representations
Annotation
This course explores transformative practices and content in the context of game culture and game industries. Aside from traditional game production, many human and non-human actors create, transform, and otherwise generate media content, which is becoming increasingly important and rivals the position of games as the main attraction of game culture.
From playthrough videos, actual play, and live-streaming to esports, fan art, cosplay, or modding, these various activities establish a rich cultural space with complex power and economic dynamics. In between game developers and players, there are now many intermediaries with their own competing agendas.
This course draws on the research traditions of media studies, game studies, fan studies, production studies, creator studies, and political economy to address the contemporary moment in game culture, which is on the one hand marked by platformization and on the other hand by decentralization of games in favor of transformative phenomena.