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

• creativeterritories@gmail.com