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Indie Game Collaboration: Emerging
Creative Territories
Patrick CroganBristol Games Hub
May 2014
Indie Games
• Recent growth of indie game production and viability
• ‘Maturing’ of the form: becoming ‘art’, expression
Other models of ‘art’
• ‘critical’ and non-entertainment uses of games as explorative and simulational experience
• the Endgame Syria (Auroch Digital 2013) controversy
• And the Paper Please (Lucas Pope 2013) success
Factors
• bundling sites, Steam and indie marketplaces on major platforms eg. X-Box Live Indie Games
• Crowd-funding sites eg. Kickstarter
• Apple and Android (and other) mobile apps marketplaces
• Flash and more recently/significantly Unity Game packages with cross-platform capabilities (vs console developer kits, licensing)
Structural factors: the ‘industry’
• Is not ‘one’: multiple, dynamic, vulnerable to technological trends, unstable vertical structures, global economic competition
• Contract and just-in-time employment promotes independent project development ‘on the side’
‘Creative Economy’
• Major focus of research today including for AHRC
• First funding stream dedicated to video games research had this emphasis from the Nesta ‘Next Gen’ recommendation to:
support better research-oriented university/industry collaborations with a view to accelerating innovation and maintaining competitive advantage in the video games industry
Creativity ?
• Often assumed, or missing in creative economy models
• Emphasis on economic, legal and infrastructural conditions
• Economy as quantitatively imagined: export revenue, job growth, UK immaterial economy ‘brand’
Creative Territories: To explore creativity in context
• Creativity as collectively enabled
• As technological/cultural/economic
• Multiple motivations: questions of value, ‘investment’, community identity,
Other models: Contributory territoryBernard Stiegler
Digital technologies, he argues, “can equally wither the life of a territory as revive it – to the extent that local government make either possible. The digital is a ‘pharmakon’ which, in order to become therapeutic for a territory instead of toxic, requires that new knowledges and new dynamics are cultivated there. In this regard, the attraction a territory holds for investors is increasingly related to what Amartya Sen calls the capacitation of its inhabitants, their sharing of values and mutual support, all of which constitutes a reflective social milieu, which is to say a critical space, much more than a ‘smart city’.”
Territories
• Place as important element in creativity
• Overlapping territories: local/immediate and regional/national/international; the community milieu
• The digital and the physical/analogue
Introducing: Project partners: The Bristol Games Hub
Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Special Guest: Jan-Pieter van Seventer of the Dutch Game Garden
Ph D. Researcher attached
Contacts/comms
• creativeterritories.dcrc.org.uk
• Tweet to @CreativTurf ; #creativeterritories