Contested Formations of Digital Game Labour
This article introduces a special issue critically investigating contemporary formations of digital game labour, with a focus on the political-economic forces, social inequalities, and technological dynamics mutually shaping these formations. Accounts of game industry practices have been at the forefront of efforts within media studies to document and theorize conditions and transformations of labor under digital capitalism. The study of digital game labour has tended to cluster around four areas of inquiry: below-the-line labour, the creative labour of game development, player-production, and game labour politics. Providing empirically informed portraits of diverse contexts and experiences of gamework, this issue interrogates multiple dimensions of precarious work and social exclusion within an industry whose playful self-image can make it a resistant object of labour-centered analysis. The contributors to this issue promote a research orientation that is attentive to how work in the digital game industry might be made more accessible and sustainable.
Image credit: Isobel Woodiwiss
