From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices

Abstract

Beyond the dominant North American and Japanese console manufacturers and multinational publishers, the global videogame industry is fragmenting. New audiences, distribution platforms, and development tools are expanding the videogame industry into an ecosystem that is at once broadly global and intensely localised. Taking advantage of this nebulous environment are increasingly visible fringes of hobbyists, amateurs, students, and artists that are pushing videogame development in new directions in terms of aesthetics, design process, and distribution channels. The activities of these fringe creators represent a critical but undertheorised aspect of the videogame industry. This article builds on Lobato and Thomas’s notion of ‘informal media economies’ to suggest that the work of these fringes can be usefully considered as informal videogame development practices. It provides a historical look at the videogame industry that demonstrates how it transitioned from a period of aggressive formalisation through the 1980s to the early 2000s into a more intense intermingling of formal and informal actors and processes in the early 2010s. In doing so, this article traces the shifting conduits of creative practice, commerce, and power that these emerging informal practices represent so as to more fully account for the contemporary global videogame industry.