Behind the Scenes of the Video Game Industry: Storytelling, Power Dynamics, and Myth

My first monograph Behind the Scenes of the Video Game Industry: Storytelling, Power Dynamics, and Myth has just been published by Routledge. The book explores stories behind video game production, building on my previous research in this area, but it fully consists of never-before-published content, ranging from theoretical discussions, and methodological frameworks to empirical case studies. The monograph investigates how behind-the-scenes narratives and making-of materials are shaped by power dynamics within the video game industry, and how they often reinforce existing professional hierarchies by shining the spotlight on those who are already at the top. Which roles, however, are undervalued? How are crunch and other problematic work practices normalized and obscured to both the industry practitioners and the public?

This book builds on concepts of industrial reflexivity (John Thornton Caldwell) and paratextuality (Gérard Genette), and the growing field of production studies to offer a critical framework for the analysis of industrial storytelling and reflexivity (presented in Chapter 3), supported by empirical case studies on art books, game awards, and promotional materials (presented in Chapters 4 and 5). Readers will gain insights into how these narratives influence the video game industry’s status quo, making it a useful resource for understanding the forces shaping game production.

Abbreviated table of contents:

Introduction 
Part A: Frameworks and Foundations

1. Theory of Industrial Storytelling

2. Production Realities and Reflections

3. The Many Voices of Industrial Storytelling

Part B: Practices

4. Making-of Materials: Promotion and Commodification

5. The Game of the Year

Conclusion: Dispelling Myths of Industrial Storytelling

Spoiling the Future Metagame: The Promotional Logic and Reception of Card Previews in Magic: The Gathering

McFarland has recently published an edited collection Beyond the Deck: Critical Essays on Magic: The Gathering and Its Influence, featuring my chapter about card previews as promotional materials and the related metagame discussions. The book, which comes out just in time for MTG’s 30th anniversary, was edited by Shelly Jones and includes contributions by a group of international scholars, covering issues ranging from mechanics and design to economies and competitions to player communities and themes beyond the game itself.

In my chapter Spoiling the Future Metagame: The Promotional Logic and Reception of Card Previews in Magic: The Gathering, I analyze the promotional function of card previews for the 2020 Q2 set Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. The findings suggest that the promotional logic is closely connected to the game’s business model and that cards that are likely to have higher prices on secondary markets due to artificial scarcity such as rares and mythic rares are given more attention during the preview period. On the other hand, most of the so-called common cards were revealed at the tail end of the promotional campaign in one big batch. The publisher and content creators all benefit from hyping up the upcoming cards. This increases the interest in strategy content as well as drives pre-order prices before the cards could have been properly tested in play. The chapter also explores metagaming discussions by players, which are sparked by the card previews and allow fans to theorycraft and hypothesize about new decks and strategies before the metagame settles again.

Mediatization of Tabletop Role-Playing: The Intertwined Cases of Critical Role and D&D Beyond

The journal Convergence has just published my article Mediatization of Tabletop Role-Playing: The Intertwined Cases of Critical Role and D&D Beyond. The article explores the impact of Critical Role (a weekly show on Twitch where voice actors, including Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson, or Matthew Mercer, play Dungeons & Dragons) and digital tools like D&D Beyond on the tabletop role-playing hobby and industry. 

 

I argue that Critical Role promotes in-person play with high-end physical accessories despite being a mediated form of tabletop role-playing. Overall, the process of mediatization of analog games, including D&D and Magic: The Gathering (see the article Mediatization of a Card game: Magic: The Gathering, Esports, and Streaming), seems to follow the logic of addition by maintaining analog modes of consumption alongside new digital and virtual ways of playing (and watching). This multitude of playstyles is marked by extensive commodification, ranging from physical accessories (miniatures, dice) to digital subscriptions and virtual goods. These findings are based on a quantitative analysis of Critical Role‘s episode sponsorships and a qualitative analysis of embodied player practices, including the use of physical accessories as well as D&D Beyond‘s digital character sheets (starting in 2018) by the cast members. Aside from advertising from TTRPG-related businesses, Critical Role is regularly sponsored by video game companies, which sometimes commission entire episodes. The show and its cast thus inhabits a unique position between analog and video game industries, further showing the complexity of the process of mediatization, which is anything but straightforward.

Normalizing Player Surveillance through Video Game Infographics

Deathloop (2021) infographic.

The journal New Media & Society has just published my article Normalizing Player Surveillance through Video Game Infographics. I argue that infographics contribute to normalization of surveillance by presenting one-sided representations of proprietary player data, which cannot be corroborated and which are made to look less problematic by focusing on harmless trivia. The infographic format is intended to make game metrics more appealing and to show telemetries as sources of fun facts. In reality, telemetries are used for optimization of game development and monetization of player activity, serving the economic agendas of developers and publishers. The specialized press is complicit in this normalization of player surveillance by running stories based on selective disclosures of proprietary data. The empirical analysis of 200 infographics suggests that the deliberate omission of more problematic and sensitive metrics points to the industry awareness of the potentially controversial nature of player surveillance if disclosed in full. Video game companies are extracting value from player behavior, yet portray the surveillance aparatus as a source of harmless fun facts.

Developer Credit: Para-Industrial Hierarchies of In-Game Credit Attribution in the Video Game Industry

The journal Games and Culture has just published my article Developer Credit: Para-Industrial Hierarchies of In-Game Credit Attribution in the Video Game Industry. In this article, I analyze in-game credits of 100 games published between 2016-2020, which represent four major sectors of video game production: AAA, AA, indie, and freemium games as service. I explore how credits shape above-the-line/below-the-line divisions and establish (or potentially subvert) professional hierarchies.

The specialized press has repeatedly reported on missing or denied credits, showing that there is no industry standard regarding what constitutes a recognized and noteworthy contribution to video game production. Despite efforts from developer organizations and initiatives like IGDA or Game Workers Unite, my analysis shows that credits are handled in various ways, leaving individual developers at the mercy of studio leadership when comes to receiving credit for their work. In the article, I highlight three major aspects of in-game credits that influence above-the-line/below-the-line divisions.

Game Production Studies Edited Collection

The edited collection Game Production Studies, which I have co-edited with Olli Sotamaa, has just been published by the Amsterdam University Press. The book, which is available in open access as well as hardcover, features 16 chapters dedicated to the study of video game production. The cover illustration was created by Jana Kilianová.

The official copy: Video games have entered the cultural mainstream and in terms of economic profits they now rival established entertainment industries such as film or television. As careers in video game development become more common, so do the stories about precarious working conditions and structural inequalities within the industry. Yet, scholars have largely overlooked video game production cultures in favor of studying games themselves and player audiences. In Game Production Studies, an international group of established and emerging researchers takes a closer look at the everyday realities of video game production, ranging from commercial industries to independent creators and cultural intermediaries. Across sixteen chapters, the authors deal with issues related to labour, game development, monetization and publishing, as well as local specificities. As the first edited collection dedicated solely to video game production, this volume provides a timely resource for anyone interested in how games are made and at what costs.

Shadow Academy of Video Game Production—Industrial Reflexivity of Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet

The journal Critical Studies in Media Communication has just published my article Shadow Academy of Video Game Production—Industrial Reflexivity of Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet. In this article, I analyze the first season of the Apple TV+ show Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet, which was co-produced by the video game publisher Ubisoft. 

The show is set in a fictional game development studio and adapts the genre of workplace comedy to this specific context. The show's creators (Rob McElhenney, Megan Ganz, and Charlie Day, who are perhaps collectively best known for their work on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) do not shy away from the problematic issues of game production, instead harnessing them for a comedic effect. Mythic Quest's satire of poor working conditions, the lack of workplace diversity, or toxic player communities can be understood using John Thornton Caldwell's concept of the shadow academy. Similar to TV shows like 30 Rock, Mythic Quest exposes structural issues of cultural industries, however it doesn't challenge their underlying causes, instead it normalizes the current status quo. Furthermore, it presents Ubisoft as a self-reflexive company despite its history of workplace issues, including Ubifree or a more recent alleged sexual misconduct of top executives. 

The article is based on thematic and discourse analysis of the first season of Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet (10 episodes), 30 journalistic interviews, 30 journalistic reviews, 5 promotional videos, and 220 user comments (sampled from 1354 comments using the logic of qualitative data saturation). A full overview of the analyzed empirical material is available here.

Definitive Playthrough Video: A Curated Playlist

In our recent New Media & Society article “Definitive Playthrough”: Behind-the-scenes Narratives in Let’s Plays and Streaming Content by Video Game Voice Actors, Jaroslav Švelch and myself have explored the genre of “definitive playthrough video” – let's plays and streams by actors who control the characters they had performed. To showcase the breadth and richness of this new phenomenon, we have put together a curated playlist focusing on key aspects, such as the role of behind-the-scenes narratives. You can find the full playlist below followed by descriptions of each of the eight videos.

Behind-the-Scenes Narratives

In the first episode of The Last of Us playthrough, Retro Replay's hosts Troy Baker (Joel) and Nolan North (David) are joined by Hana Hayes who plays the role of Joel's daughter Sarah. Together, they look back at the recording process of the game’s emotional opening scene. Baker and Hayes talk about having to reshoot the scene multiple times and about Neil Druckmann’s approach to directing. The viewers also learn about a disagreement between the developers and the publisher about the pacing of the game’s prologue.

 

"Definitive Playthrough": Behind-the-scenes Narratives in Let's Plays and Streaming Content by Video Game Voice Actors

The journal New Media & Society has published the article “Definitive Playthrough”: Behind-the-scenes Narratives in Let’s Plays and Streaming Content by Video Game Voice Actors, which I wrote together with Jaroslav Švelch. In this second article from our video game voice acting project, we explore how video game voice actors are picking up streaming and creating a new genre by combining variety streaming with behind-the-scenes narratives. We dub this new phenomenon "definitive playthrough video" based on the label used by Retro Replay. In these videos, actors Nolan North and Troy Baker play games in which they portrayed the main characters (the Uncharted series or The Last of Us). In the article, we present three case studies of YouTube and Twitch channels that create this type of video content: Dechart Games (hosted by Bryan Dechart and Amelia Rose Blaire), Retro Replay, and Strange Rebel Gaming (hosted by Briana White).

We provide a quantitative overview of these channels and their viewership numbers as well as qualitative analysis of their individual approaches to "definitive playthrough video". What distinguishes this new genre from general variety streaming is the exclusive access to production trivia and an authorial interpretation of games. Due to their involvement in game production, actors can claim to have a unique perspective that sets them apart from other content creators. While actors are adopting the formats and practices of streaming culture, they are using streaming to highlight their individual artistic achievements, and also to teach production literacy to their audiences. This requires a great deal of relational labor on the part of actors and balancing of multiple careers. Although "definitive playthrough videos" rarely challenge corporate behind-the-scenes narratives and the magic of game making and therefore serve as promotion, they give the actors the opportunity to advocate for the importance of their profession which can harnessed in labor disputes such as the SAG-AFTRA 2016-17 strike, which we explored in our previous article on voice acting Recasting Life Is Strange: Video Game Voice Acting during the 2016–2017 SAG-AFTRA Strike. Furthermore, streaming culture gives platform to actors whose position in the game industry is often seen as marginal compared to other game development roles.

Recasting Life Is Strange: Video Game Voice Acting during the 2016–2017 SAG-AFTRA Strike

The journal Television and New Media has published the article Recasting Life Is Strange: Video Game Voice Acting during the 2016–2017 SAG-AFTRA Strike, which I wrote together with Jaroslav Švelch. In the article, we explore the recasting of Life Is Strange: Before the Storm caused by the strike, which forced Ashly Burch to give up her role of Chloe Price from the first game. While Burch became a writing consultant for the prequel and the performance of the new actor Rhianna DeVries was generally praised, the recasting still caused heated discussion about the importance of video game voice casting. 

Our analysis shows that some voice actors qualify as above-the-line talent partly thanks to their strong identification with popular in-game characters, which is often strengthened by appearance of actors in official promotional videos (such as the one embedded below). Actors in supporting roles try to rise above the figurative line by engaging in relational labor (livestreaming, cosplaying, and connecting with fans), highlighting their involvement in the game to compensate for precarious working conditions and contingent employment. During the strike, the above-the-line status and relational labor could be used to mobilize support for the union something that other more central but less visible professions in the video game industry might not be able to do. While not all SAG-AFTRA's demands were met, the recasting drew attention to voice acting and reignited the interest in organized labor action We conclude that the struggle for better working conditions calls for solidarity between above-the-line and below-the-line workers, as well as between core and peripheral professions.

Redefining Screenshots: Toward Critical Literacy of Screen Capture Practices

The journal Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies has published my article Redefining Screenshots: Toward Critical Literacy of Screen Capture Practices. This terminological intervention comes 13 years after Cindy Poremba's seminal article on video game screenshots and is based on a thorough theoretical exploration of screen capture practices, including historical examples such as roentgen photography, Oscillons, or pictures of computer-aided design tools. I call for a more careful consideration of screenshots' mode of representation, arguing that iconic resemblance and presumed indexicality of these images are often subverted by transformative practices of promotional and artistic screenshots. As such, the perceived documentary function of screenshots should always be questioned and authors working with screenshots should provide a detailed account of the circumstances of the screen capture process to support (or dispel) the vernacular understanding of screenshots as visual evidence.

Paratextuality in Game Studies: A Theoretical Review and Citation Analysis

My new article about paratextual scholarship in game research was published in the June 2020 issue of the open access journal Game Studies. In Paratextuality in Game Studies: A Theoretical Review and Citation Analysis, I identify and discuss three major approaches to paratextuality: (1) the original framework proposed by Gérard Genette, (2) the expanded framework popularized in game studies by Mia Consalvo, and (3) the reduced framework suggested by Werner Wolf and applied to games by Annika Rockenberger. Besides noting the key differences between these approaches and their suitability for specific areas of game studies, such as production studies or formal analysis, I track the distribution of these frameworks and their respective key references on a corpus of 235 English publications published between 1997 and 2019. 

One of the key findings is that the majority of the analyzed publications (71%) follow the expanded approach, which is further supported by the amount of direct references to Consalvo's Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (2007). This book, which represents the first major introduction of the expanded approach to game studies, was cited more often than Genette's own major monograph on the topic Paratexts: Threshold of Interpretation (1997 [1987]). In the article, I do not attempt to declare which framework is the "right" one, instead I explore their individual strengths and weaknesses and argue for greater terminological clarity and the acknowledgement of these three distinct approaches by scholars who use the concept of paratextuality.

The same issue of Game Studies also features Jaroslav Švelch's article Should the Monster Play Fair?: Reception of Artificial Intelligence in Alien: Isolation. Make sure to check that one out, too.

Mediatization of a Card Game: Magic: The Gathering, Esports, and Streaming

The journal Media, Culture & Society has recently published my article Mediatization of a card game: Magic: The Gathering, esports, and streaming. This piece explores the recent shift of the genre-defining trading card game towards esports. By analyzing Twitch streams, paratextual material, and online discussions in the period from September 2018 to March 2019, leading up to the first major tournament - The Mythic Invitational - played using the new digital adaptation Magic: The Gathering Arena, I show that this top-mediatization is a contested process with its own discontinuities and opposing forces. To a certain extent, the new competitive structure organized around esports-like league consisting of 32 top ranked players from the season 2018-2019 turned many of these selected professional players into advocates of this transition, although not all of the changes were welcomed by the community. The "legacy" ways of playing - the tabletop version and older digital adaption Magic: The Gathering Online - remain supported, but Arena is central to the new stage of the game both for competitive and more casual audiences. Furthermore, the more mainstream interest in Magic: The Gathering draws attention to various long-standing issues in the player communities, such as the often uncontested notions of meritocracy and the lack of diversity.

Resisting the Perpetual Update: Struggles against Protocological Power in Video Games

The journal New Media & Society has recently published my article Resisting the Perpetual Update: Struggles against Protocological Power in Video Games. This article explores the evolution of video game updates and patches from a mechanism of customer support to a tool of control over the way games are played in the ecosystem of digital gaming platforms. It charts a historical trajectory across various cultural industries, including literary publishing, screen industries, and music, to show a shift from multiplicity of editions to one perpetually updated contingent commodity. Focusing on the issues of power and control enabled by the always-online platforms, the analysis shows that previously updating was often voluntary. However, now players must actively resist patches if they wish to play the game on their own terms. As illustrated by three case studies of update resistance (Borderlands 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Marvel Strike Force), developers, publishers, and platform holders wield protocological power, which can be successfully opposed—although the outcome often remains localized and tends to alter a specific iteration of protocol and not the underlying infrastructure.

Analog Game Studies: Volume 3

The third volume of the Analog Game Studies journal was just published by the ETC Press. The full book can be downloaded for free here in PDF. Among other articles and essays on analog games, there is also my piece about Magic: The Gathering, which focuses on a critique of the computational essentialism of platform studies. This article was previously published in the online version of the journal in 2016 (link). The third volume was edited by Emma Leigh Waldron, Aaron Trammell, and Evan Torner.

Analog Game Studies is a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. It defines analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more.

The Myth of Representative Video Game Trailers

In the new special issue of the journal Kinephanos about the promotional context of video games, you can also find my own contribution about video game trailers. The article entitled Exploring the Myth of the Representative Trailer analyzes the widely spread notion of representativity of video game trailers, which often leads to dissapointment upon the release of a game.

Beyond dicsussing the origins of the video game trailer and its specificities, I present an empirical analysis of the reception of twelve trailers for eight mainstream games grounded in online dicussions on YouTube and three gaming news sites (Eurogamer.net, Kotaku, and Polygon). The fidings show different approches to trailer watching from information-driven perspective, which highlight the paratextual role of a trailer, to more cinematic ones, which appreciate the self-contained entertainment value of a video game trailer. Nonetheless, trailers are in many cases judged based on their perceived representativity. This means that trailers that are more detached from a given game, for example by not employing gameplay footage, are often criticized by their lack of direct (indexical) representational relationship. Even the knowledge about recent cases of misleading trailers does not stop viewers from basing their expectaions of a video game and its features purely on paratextual information. Notably, some video game fans believe that they are able to see through marketing ploys and accurately predict how the game is going to play like once it is released.

One of the analyzed trailers is the CGI commercial for BioShock Infinite, which shows a rather non-canonical narrative sequence from the fictional world of the game. For its departure from the source material, it has been criticized by many viewers. The main reasons was the (perceived) lack of representativity, which is also explicitly communicated by the trailer through its footage disclaimer.

Paratextuality in Video Game Culture - Dissertation

My recently defended PhD thesis provides a thorough update of video game paratextuality based on Genette's original framework. In the opening chapters, I review the current research on paratexts in game studies, media studies, literary theory, and film and television studies, including the highly influential redefinitions by Mia Consalvo and Jonathan Gray. I argue that the current state of paratextual research is often misleading. In many notable cases, scholars shift away from the original meaning of the concept without fully acknowledging the consequences of such a departure on the applicability of Genette's framework. This applies both to the reduced scope proposed by Werner Wolf and to the expanded version, which can be found in works of Consalvo and Gray.

My redefinition of paratextuality is based on the underlying concept of transtextuality. In the context of other transtextual relationships such as metatextuality or hypertextuality (in Genettian sense of adaptation and transformation of an existing text), paratextuality is established as link between a text and the surrounding socio-historical reality. The updated definitions are accompanied by a methodological framework for analysis of paratextuality in video games. I provide conceptualizations of four main paratextual dimensions: (1) function, (2) authorship, (3) substantiality, and (4) spatiotemporality.

Dimension	Operationalization	Main Categories
Function	Categories	1. Referential	1a. Promotional
			1b. Legal
		2. Instructional
		3. Interfacial
		4. Corrective
		5. Revelatory
Authorship	Discrete categories	1. Authorial
		2. Worker’s
		3. Publisher’s
		4. Distributor’s
		5. Retailer’s
		6. Allographic
Substantiality	Categories	1. Semiotic
		2. Sensorial
		3. Technical/Material
		4. Factual/Cultural
Spatiotemporality	Two-dimensional continuum	x-axis – before and after launch y-axis – outside and inside the surface

Table 1: Overview of paratextual dimensions and their operationalization

The empirical part of the thesis focuses on video game trailers as an example of video game paratextuality. I analyze both the formal aspects of twelve selected trailers as well as their audience reception. The findings of the formal analysis show that video game trailers are to a certain extent paratextual as they address the socio-historical circumstances of video game production by informing about developers, publishers or release dates. At the same time, many trailers feature original content and possess an aesthetic quality which makes them autonomous in the sense of an artistic text in its own right. This ambiguous nature of video game trailers is also reflected in their reception. In the analyzed online discussions, viewers sometimes emphasize the paratextual capacity of trailers by focusing on their informational value. Others highlight their cinematic quality and praise (or criticize) them based on their own merits. Overall, the combined findings suggest that trailers are a complex phenomenon of video game culture and they cannot be easily classified as either paratext, or text. Instead, I propose to focus on individual traits and characteristics trailer by rejecting the reductive label of paratext, which is currently used to classify any video game epiphenomena.

You can read the full dissertation here: link

Playing with and against Microtransactions

The cover of the edited volume.

The edited volume The Evolution and Social Impact of Video Game Economics has been recently published by Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield). It features my chapter about acceptance and rejection of video game microtransactions in full-priced mainstream video games. I take a closer look at the implementation of additional monetization models in five video games: Mass Effect 3, Dead Space 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mortal Kombat X, and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Beside a formal analysis of the types of microtransactions including their pricing and overlaps with downloadable content (DLC), I explore the online discussions about the reception of microtransactions. I identify several discourses that feature arguments such as general unaccepability, diversification, cosmetics, single-player traditionalism, cooperation, and transparency. I also focus on declarative behavior of players regarding microtransactions, including various forms of political consumerism and cheating.