Studying and Speaking to Industries: A Game Studies Roundtable

Question Feminist and critical media research is—or should be—inherently activist, working to unearth and ameliorate structural inequalities in industries, texts, and audiences. However, academic work too often ends up behind paywalls or other barriers, read only by fellow academics. How, then, can we best study media industries and actively share our findings with those who work within them? Using the (notoriously secretive) games industry as an example, participants in this roundtable will share their experiences studying games and speaking to industry members, discussing common challenges, methods for surmounting these, and strategies for building deliberately activist industries work. Convener Dr. Kishonna Gray is Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She previously served as an MLK Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT in Comparative Media Studies and the Women & Gender Studies Program, and as a Faculty Visitor at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research (Cambridge). Her work interrogates the impact that technology has on culture and how Black users, in particular, influence the creation of technological products and the dissemination of digital artifacts. Email: kishonnagray@gmail.com Respondents Christopher A. Paul One of the things that drew me to academia was the ability to engage in critique. The point of rhetorical analysis is to think deeply about a text and then make an argument regarding how it works. In my case, I typically take those tools and use them to analyze games and their surrounding discussions. The time, space, and cognitive distance I need to do that work is something that those in industry cannot generally afford. They are often deep in the muck of creating something or managing the fallout from decisions they have already made. This opens up fertile ground for discussion and partnership. I have honed my craft at critique, while those in industry have developed theirs at production. Based on this, I have found that I need to construct my work to engage industry audiences. If I write and speak in a manner that draws people in, I can invite those with the ability to help reinvent video games to do so. From the outside I can bring them critique to think differently about the choices they make, but it requires that I think carefully about how I choose to construct my arguments. I have found the most productive route to that is to write clearly, accessibly, and use a variety of examples. Keeping industry in mind as a key audience for what I write enables me to develop relationships with developers in an effort to address the criticisms I have about games and how they work. Kelly Bergstrom Ethnographic investigations of game development companies have documented toxic workplaces and the burdens placed upon workers who fall outside the stereotypical (white, male) games industry worker (Bulut, 2015, 2020; Chee, 2016; Chia, 2019). However, non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements can make it difficult to locate informants who are willing to participate in academic research studies that apply a critical lens to the games industry. In an effort to collect data that reduces the risks faced by individuals who might be punished for speaking about the less-than-positive aspects of the field, researchers have begun to examine public-facing texts written for and by game industry professionals (Cote and Harris, 2020; de Castell and Skardzius, 2019). In my own work, I have turned to public texts such as videos posted to YouTube, comments on Reddit, and—as discussed in this paper—anonymous employee reviews left on Glassdoor.com, as sources to learn what work is like ‘behind the scenes’ in the game industry. Here, I argue there is ample evidence that these public (and often anonymous) texts offer media industry scholars an opportunity to study worker concerns while mitigating potential harm to informants who might otherwise be reluctant to speak ‘on the record’ about the games industry. Furthermore, I argue that it is important to thread these concerns throughout both our research, but also our teaching about media industries to better prepare students for the realities of working in an industry that uses “doing what you love” as an excuse for long hours and inadequate pay. Amanda Cote As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, any given field tends to develop a habitus: a set of practices, expectations, and social relationships that members of that field come to internalize as the norm and which often structure future decisions. Although individuals can break free of their habitus, or change it over time, it can be difficult to do so from within the system itself. Outside perspectives offer a broader potential for rethinking. Such has been my experience in my past and ongoing work on labor practices in video game development. Through trade press analysis, my research (with co-author Brandon Harris) has revealed how exploitative labor practices—specifically “crunch”, or extensive overtime—come to be taken for granted in the industry, to the extent that developers can struggle to break the cycle of overwork. As an outsider to the games industry, my perspective on labor practices starts from a different set of assumptions than a developer’s approach to this topic and can ideally help encourage new perspectives and develop more wide-ranging solutions. In turn, my findings have pushed me to think more critically about labor practices in academia, where troublingly similar patterns of overwork (often for the sake of one’s “passion”) occur. In this roundtable, I will discuss how studying one industry can generate meaningful perspectives on another. I also look forward to discussing with my fellow participants how we can extend this self-reflection to action, for the benefit of our own industry as well as media and games. Alison Harvey Critical feminist scholarship of digital games, including its notoriously homogenous and exclusionary industry, is a well-established, active field, and in the last decade interventions drawing on feminist participation action research and other activist methodologies have been on the rise. I would situate my research on informal and formal education in games here, as it considers how women and other marginalized communities face barriers to entry and progression. Feminist action approaches necessitate collaboration with games stakeholders as well as diverse forms of outputs, including toolkits, recommendations, newsletters, and presentations at industry events. This work can be rewarding but entail a range of skills not commonly embedded in academic training, necessitating at times strange and potentially uncomfortable partnerships. The values and principles of feminist theory become extremely complex when enacted in practice and with industry figures who feel torn between conflicting discourses (e.g. diversity is important, but we must hire based on merit rather than employment equity). These conflicts do not only characterize the industry-side: in many ways, the praxis of feminist research on the games industry aligns with universities’ and funding bodies’ emphasis on deploying research insights for non-academic outcomes (‘impact’ in the UK and ‘knowledge mobilization’ in Canadian quarters). In this way, feminist structural critiques of labour in games can feed into neoliberal research culture that perpetuates similar issues of exclusion and exploitation. In this roundtable I want to focus on these tensions and contradictions, outlining strategies I’ve learned across several research projects and ongoing challenges I grapple with. Christine H. Tran Who gets credit for their homework? With the global ascent of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, the domestic interiors of Twitch streamers rose to renewed attention by teleworker media and researchers alike. Recent game streaming studies have stressed domestic backgrounds as integral technologies in Twitch careers (Smyth et al., 2021; Ruberg and Lark, 2021). Let us hesitate, however, to essentialize homes as once private mediums newly opened by the flick of a webcam. The reproduction of work(ers) for “public” spheres of leisure and labour has long relied on gendered, racialized, and/or underclass workers in “private” spheres (Singh and Sharma, 2019). From community managers to spousal support, the global games supply chain is no exception to interdependencies of technological and domestic work (Bulut, 2020; Dyer-Withford and de Peuter, 2006). On or off camera, how do we study the diveristy of housed labour embedded in livestreaming? For steaming scholars, this begins with denaturalizing our distinction between research sites and our own homes. Building on social reproduction theory, I argue that further theorizations of “home” are integral to emerging methods in digital streaming studies. As the Manifesto of Patchwork Ethnography imparts, observation must start “from the acknowledgement that recombinations of 'home' and 'field' have now become necessities--more so in the face of the current pandemic” (Günel et al., 2020). I argue the femininst and decolonial theorization at the heart of patchwork ethnography offers streaming studies a means to foreground non-extractive insights into the widespread cultural work of staying home, for pay and play. Akil Fletcher In the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in 2020, dozens of game companies took a newfound interest in aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Numerous companies and developers such as Sony, InfinityWard, and Insomniac put out statements in support of BLM and promised to do their part against racial injustice. However, in my research, when I asked Black players if they felt companies were doing their part to support them, almost everyone I asked answered, “no”. Nearly everyone I spoke with told me they felt that the video games industry only superficially supported BLM and that

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