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hey just couldn’t imagine—and I mean this in the most ordinarily descriptive way possible—could not imagine that the old way of doing things might fail.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

A massive open online class is usually a series of video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests, open to anyone. That’s what makes them OOCs. The M part, though, comes from the world. As we learned from Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good, free online materials can attract extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.

Last year, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, an online course from Stanford taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus.

The size of Thrun and Norvig’s course, and the attention attracted by Udacity (and similar organizations like Coursera, P2PU, and University of the People), have many academics worrying about the effect on higher education. The loudest such worrying so far has been The Trouble With Online Education,

“Why would anyone take an online class when they can buy a better education at UVA?” But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18 year old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of MOOCs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn’t what education of “the very best sort” looks like, but what the whole system looks like.

But you know what? Those classes weren’t like jazz compositions. They didn’t create genuine intellectual community. They didn’t even create ersatz intellectual community. They were just great lectures: we showed up, we listened, we took notes, and we left, ready to discuss what we’d heard in smaller sections.

Higher education has a bad case of cost disease

An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price. For live music, this means hiring less-talented musicians, selling more tickets per performance, writing grant applications, or, of course, raising ticket prices. For colleges, this means more graduate and adjunct instructors, increased enrollments and class size, fundraising, or, of course, raising tuition.

Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time.

The minute you try to explain exactly why we do it this way, though, the setup starts to seem a little bizarre. What would it be like to teach at a university where a you could only assign books you yourself had written? Where you could only ask your students to read journal articles written by your fellow faculty members? Ridiculous. Unimaginable.

e ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you’re at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not.

Any sentence that begins “Let’s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”

ny institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list.

Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75% of students—over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of

As Ian Bogost says, MOOCs are marketing for elite schools.

Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrolls as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.

The fight over MOOCs isn’t about the value of college; a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education.

The fight over MOOCs isn’t even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them. If critics of online education were consistent, they would believe that the University of Virginia’s Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies or Rutger’s MLIS degree are abominations, or else they would have to believe that there is a credit-worthy way to do online education, one MOOCs could emulate. Neither argument is much in evidence.

the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it.

How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?

Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.

If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. University of Arkansas at Little Rock? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.

Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there’s no containing the story it tells: “It’s possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free.”

Open systems are open.

The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.

In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail.

The phrase “alternate careers” is thus remarkable at second glance not for suggesting that there are alternatives but for the centrality it still accords to those academic careers that are not alternate. This centrality is not just an effect of graduate study and not only perceptible within the academy; it shapes the way universities are understood as workplaces even by those who stand outside them.

strongly defined intellectual and professional career trajectory that, as Alan Liu astutely observes in The Laws of Cool, may no longer be characteristic of modern knowledge work: “to be a professional-managerial-technical worker now is to stake one’s authority on an even more precarious knowledge that has to be re-earned with every new technological change.

These “alternative” or “para-academic” jobs within the academy have a great deal to teach us about how academic labor is quantified, about different models of work and work product, and about the ways that aptitude, skill, expertise, and productivity are weighed in assessing different kinds of work.

the significant parameters were essentially these. My pretax income for the academic year was $12,500, and my formal work responsibilities were to prepare and teach two undergraduate writing courses of my own design. The time commitment for my teaching responsibilities was assumed to be approximately twenty hours per week. In addition, it was assumed that I would undertake my own research and make progress toward my PhD.

the research I conducted as a student (preparing for professional advancement through field exams, writing conference papers, and participating in the intellectual life of the department by attending public lectures and university seminars) was not considered work, or at least not compensable work.

Students are positioned as net gainers from, rather than contributors to, the reservoir of knowledge the university contains, and the fellowship stipends they receive are characterized as “aid” rather than as compensation

I was accountable for all my time to the PhD program I was in, not just for my paid duties or even for a standard forty-hour work week, but potentially all the hours not devoted to sleeping and eating.

this erosion of a boundary between the professional and personal space is a familiar and very common effect of graduate study, and (even more anecdotally) I would observe that the people who typically enter a graduate program are likely to have the kind of personality that lends itself to this erosion: highly motivated with a strong sense of duty and an established habit of hard work and deferral of personal pleasure (or an ability to experience hard work as pleasure)

I tended to feel that the research work required of me was effectively limitless: that no amount of effort could be sufficient to really complete it and that therefore no time could legitimately be spent on anything else.

Each hour of project work, in other words, stood on the back of a fairly substantial apparatus that was necessary to make that hour possible. Without the e-mail, the payroll, the servers, and so forth, project work wouldn’t be possible. However, for many collaborators and funding agencies, this model appeared not only counterintuitive but deeply troubling because it made our work look much more expensive than anyone else’s

Running in parallel to this entire narrative is another with an entirely different developmental trajectory. Since 2000, my partner and I have had a small consulting business through which we have worked on an eclectic range of projects, ranging from simple database development to digital publication to grant writing

The value of this kind of consulting work—for both the consultant and the client—is the self-consciousness it provides concerning the nature of the work being done and the terms on which it is conducted

For the client, self-consciousness results from having to bring all of this to articulation, and the result is often a better (because more explicit, transparent, and widely shared) set of intellectual configurations within the client’s project or environmen

For instance, work processes might be explicitly documented; latent disagreements might be brought to the surface and resolved; methodological inconsistencies or lacunae might be examined and rationalized.

it is interesting to observe that digital humanities, as an institutional phenomenon, has evolved very substantially out of groups that were originally positioned as “service” units and staffed by people with advanced degrees in the humanities: in other words, people with substantial subject expertise who had gravitated toward a consulting role and found it congenial and intellectually inspiring. The research arising out of this domain, at its most rigorous and most characteristic, is on questions of method.

Mark selected text as Mark

our technical expertise (in this case, familiarity with markup languages and XML publishing) had an obvious relevance and importance, but arguably more important was the ability to understand and explain the editorial significance of technical decisions and to serve as a bridge between the two strands of the project: the project’s editorial work (conducted by senior humanities faculty) and the project’s technical implementation (overseen by professional staff at the MLA who manage the production of the editions in print and digital form but for whom the XML is largely unfamiliar terrain).

The discourse around the use of XML was substantially instrumental: it concerned the practicalities of supporting a digital interface and generating PDF output and similar issues.Treating this work as information modeling, however, has produced a subtle shift in these relationships.

Where in the print production process the editorial manuscript was taken as the most informationally rich artifact in the ecology (whose contents would be translated into an effective print carrier for those ideas), in the digital process the editorial manuscript is a precursor to that state: the XML encoding brings information structures that are latent or implicit in the manuscript into formal visibility.

what has proven most useful (and what students most remark on in their evaluations of the class) is the kind of embedded knowledge I represent: the understanding of methods, approaches, and strategies that arise out of real-world experience at a functioning digital publication project

The course I teach covers a number of highly technical subjects (schema writing, XML, metadata), but its emphasis is strongly on how we can understand the significance and contextual utility of these technologies within a set of larger strategic concerns. Although on paper I only became a plausible hire with the completion of my PhD, the credential that really grounds the teaching I do is actually the fifteen years I spent not completing that degree and working instead in the variety of roles detailed earlier.

for the typical humanities faculty member, most of these paradigms of work are equally alien; only the first will look truly familiar (the adjunct faculty position is familiar but not to be identified with).

what characterizes mainstream academic work is two qualities. The first is the unlimitedness of the responsibility: work interpenetrates life, and we do what is necessary. For instance, we attend conferences without there being a question of whether it’s our “own” time or our employer’s time;

The second, related characteristic is the way time is conceptualized as a function of work practice. Time for academics is not regulated in detail, only in blocks. (For nine months you are paid; for three months you are free to do other things; at all times you should be working on your next book.)Most digital humanities work, however—as performed by library staff, IT staff, and other para-academic staff who are not faculty—is conceptualized according to one of the other models: hourly, by FTE, or as an agenda of projects that granularizes and regulates the work in quantifiable ways. Increasingly, the use of project management tools to facilitate oversight and coordination of work within IT organizations has also opened up the opportunity to track time, and this has fostered an organizational culture in which detailed managerial knowledge of time spent on specific tasks and on overhead is considered virtuous and even essential.

The importance of qualitative rather than quantitative measures of work is similarly a kind of class marker: the cases in which specific metrics are typically applied (e.g., number of students and courses taught, quantity of committee work) are those that are least felt to be characteristically scholarly work. Quantifying scholarly output can only be done at the crudest level (e.g., number of books or articles published), and the relative and comparative nature of these assessments quickly becomes apparent: a monumental, groundbreaking book is worth much more (but how much more?) than a slighter intervention, and it takes a complex apparatus of review to establish, even approximately, the relative value of different scholarly productions.

the tension between quantitative and qualitative measures of productivity was a constant source of methodological self-consciousness.

This last formulation—accomplishing the same task with available resources—reverses the narrative of academic work that is on view at liberal arts colleges and research universities, in which a thoughtful person pursues his or her original ideas and is rewarded for completing and communicating them. In this narrative, the defining and motivating force is the individual mind, with its unique profile of subject knowledge and animating research vision.

the effect of this model of work is to treat people as resources—as a kind of pool from which one can draw off a quantum of work when needed. The result of this fractionalization may be felt as a positive or negative effect: either of fragmented attention or of fascinating variety. But in either case it constitutes a displacement of autonomy concerning what to work on when and how long to take

What is the effect of this fungibility, this depersonalization of labor on the para-academic staff? What is my life like as a worker (and a self-conscious manager) in these conditions?

Our expectations of what work should be like are strongly colored by the cultural value and professional allure of research, and we expect to be valued for our individual contributions and expertise, not for our ability to contribute a seamless module to a work product. Our paradigm for professional output is authorship, even if actual authoring is something we rarely have enough time to accomplish.

But in 2025, what will the now-commonplace jobs (web programmer, digital project coordinator, programmer/analyst, and so forth) look like as professional identities, especially to people who may never have imagined themselves as scholars in the first place?

What are the larger effects of accounting for time and regulating it in these ways? One important effect is that time and work appear fungible and interconvertible. The calculus of time and effort by which we know the cost and value of an hour of an employee’s time is also the basis for assessing how those resources could be used otherwise. On the spreadsheet that tracks the project, that unit of funding (time, product) could be spent to purchase an equivalent quantum of time or product from some other source: from a vendor, from an undergraduate, from a consultant, from an automated process running on an expensive piece of equipment.

Will a new set of credentials arise through which these jobs can be trained for and aimed at, avoiding the sense of professional anomaly that (in my experience at least) produces such a useful form of outsiderism?

most PhD candidates the idea of accepting a job other than a tenure-track faculty position is tantamount to an admission of failure. The reason why Mr. Silva assumed that I was Professor Flanders—the reason that no alternative is visible to him—is that no alternative can be articulated by the profession itself.

In the archetypal digital humanities collaboration, traditional faculty explore forms of work that would ordinarily look “technical” or even menial (such as text encoding, metadata creation, or transcription); programmers contribute to editorial decisions; and students coauthor papers with senior scholars in a kind of Bakhtinian carnival of overturned professional usages.

For technical staff, these collaborative relationships produce a much richer intellectual context for their work and also convey a sense of the complexity of humanities data and research problems, which in turn makes for better, more thoughtful technical work. For students, the opportunity to work on real-world projects with professional collaborators gives unparalleled exposure to real intellectual problems, job demands, and professional skills across a wide range of roles, which in turn may yield a more fully realized sense of the landscape of academic work.

The rest of the team brings talents from art, computer, education, music, and telecommunication backgrounds, but they may not share the understanding of the historical events or the commitment to getting details accurate.

Historians contribute to the process of designing a gaming experience by providing three important aspects of the design sequence: fact checking, process identification, and curriculum collaboration.

Visitors to museums and historic sites and school students can engage in interactive history-themed games to learn historical, geographic, economic, or civic processes

A virtual experience like a game or video never takes the place of a direct experience, but it does allow a greater audience to become attracted to the site.

When teachers select educational games for the classroom, the games must be keyed into academic standards, and they must have measurable knowledge outcomes in subjects such as history, geography, economics, or civics.

Narrative-driven solutions are not appropriate for games

Video is very narrative-driven and allows the flexibility of looking at multiple perspectives from a single phone by referring to multiple quotations from primary sources and examining different characters present on a battlefield at the same time

A more interactive approach for classroom students would be for them to gather evidence from the battlefield to provide evidence of their construction of knowledge

As a marketing tool these games can help a historical site establish followers who become interested in the content prior to making a pilgrimage to the site

At a minimum, historians need to embrace new priorities for research publications that explicate their process of interfacing with, exploring, and then making sense of historical sources in a fundamentally digital form—that is, the hermeneutics of data.

This may mean de-emphasizing narrative in favor of illustrating the rich complexities between an argument and the data that supports it

This is especially true in terms of the sheer quantity of data now available that can be gathered in a short time and thus guide humanistic inquiry

We must also point out that, while data certainly can be employed as evidence for a historical argument, data are not necessarily evidence in themselves

we argue that the creation of, interaction with, and interpretation of data must become more integral to historical writing.

Use of data in the humanities has recently attracted considerable attention, and no project more so than Culturomics, a quantitative study of culture using Google Books

the nature of data and the way it has been used by historians in the past differs in several important respects from contemporary uses of data

As humanists continue to prove that data manipulation and machine learning can confirm existing knowledge, such techniques come closer to telling us something we don’t already know

However, even these projects generally focus on research (or research potential) rather than on making their methodology accessible to a broader humanities audience

The processes for working with the vast amounts of easily accessible and diverse large sets of data suggest a need for historians to formulate, articulate, and propagate ideas about how data should be approached in historical research

For one, it does not refer only to historical analysis via complex statistical methods to create knowledge.

Perhaps such a potential dependence on numbers became even more unpalatable to non-numerical historians after an embrace of the cultural turn, the importance of subjectivity

Even as data become more readily available and as historians begin to acquire data manipulation skills as part of their training, rigorous mathematics is not necessarily essential for using data efficiently and effectively

work with data can be exploratory and deliberately without the mathematical rigor that social scientists must use to support their epistemological claims.

historians need not treat and interpret data only for rigorous hypothesis testing

To some extent, historians have always collected, analyzed, and written about data. But having access to vastly greater quantities of data, markedly different kinds of datasets, and a variety of complex tools and methodologies for exploring it means that “using” signifies a much broader range of activities than it has previously.

knowledge from visualizations as not simply “transferred, revealed, or perceived, but…created through a dynamic process.

using large amounts of data for research should not be considered opposed to more traditional use of historical sources.

More often than not, distant reading will involve (if not require) creative and reusable techniques to re-imagine and re-present the past—at least more so than traditional humanist texts do.

we need more explicit and careful (if not playful) ways ways of writing about them

teven Ramsay has suggested that there is a new kind of role for searching to play in the hermeneutic process of understanding, especially in the value of ‘screwing around’ and embracing the serendipitous discovery that our recent abundance of data makes possibl

easier than ever for historians to combine different kinds of datasets—and thus provide an exciting new way to triangulate historical knowledge

Although relatively simple text searches or charts that aid in our historical analysis are perhaps not worth including in a book

While these can present new perspectives on the past, they can only do so to the extent that other historians feel comfortable with the methodologies that are used.

It is clear that a new relationship between text and data has begun to unfold.13 This relationship must inform our approach to writing as well as research.

the reasons why many historians remain skeptical about data are not all that different from the reasons they can be skeptical about text.

Beyond explicit tutorials, there are several key advantages in foregrounding our work with data:

2) It is instructive as part of teaching and exposing historical research practices; 3) It allows us to keep pace with changing tools and ways of using them.

Google’s data is proprietary and exactly what comprises it is unclear

But going beyond the data—making sense of it—can be facilitated by additional expertise in ways that our usually much more naturally circumscribed historical data has generally not required.

Owens blogged about this research while it was in progress, describing what he was interested in, how he got his data, how he was working with it, along with a link for others to explore and download the data.

Owens received several substantive comments from scholars and researchers.

These ranged from encouraging the exploration of technical guides, learning from scholarship on the notion of the reader in the context of the history of the book, and suggestions for different prepositions that could further elucidate semantic relationships about “users.”

Sharing preliminary representations of data, providing some preliminary interpretations of them, and inviting others to consider how best to make sense of the data at hand, quickly sparked a substantive scholarly conversation

this chart is not historical evidence of sufficient (if any) rigor to support historical knowledge claims about what is or isn’t a user.

How far, for example, can expressions of data like Google’s Ngram viewer be used in historical work?

how does one cite data without black-boxy mathematical reductions, and bring the data itself into the realm of scholarly discourse?

How does one show, for example, that references to “sinful” in the nineteenth century appear predominantly in sermon and other exegetical literature in the early part of the century, but become overshadowed by more secular references later in the century? Typically, this would be illustrated with pithy, anecdotal examples taken to be representative of the phenomenon. But does this adequately represent the research methodology? Does it allow anyone to investigate for themselves? Or learn from the methodology?

Far better would be to explain the steps used to collect and reformat the data; ideally, the data would be available for download

Overall, there has been no aversion to using data in historical research. But historians have started to use data on new scales, and to combine different kinds of data that range widely over typical disciplinary boundaries

Approaching these materials in a context sensitive way requires substantial amounts of time and energy devoted to how exactly we can interpret data

Historical data might require little more than simple frequency counts, simple correlations, or reformatting to make it useful to the historian looking for anomalies, trends, or unusual but meaningful coincidences.

That simulation games represent problem-spaces is in some respects just a more sophisticated articulation of the basic core of game-ness. By most definitions games require players, conflict, and a quantifiable outcome.

As expansive as a game might be in its treatments, it will impose arbitrary limits on its subject. These limits begin with the roles and goals of the player, decisions that shape the entire design

The quantifiable gameplay elements and mechanics all, in a tightly designed game any way, factor directly into whether the player achieves their goals.

There has been excellent discussion on Play the Past about the appropriateness of, and methods for critiquing simulations historically.

they are interpretations in the form of quantifiable problem spaces

It suggests considerations for rigorous and meaningful criticism that is holistic and sensitive to the medium

why Colonization codes native peoples the way it does, why Civilization does not deal with social issues in cities, or why East India Company does not represent the tensions between English and Indian customs—one needs to consider holistically the problem space selected by the designers

Generally speaking however—and I welcome examples where this is not the case—simulation games, especially pleasurable and/or commercially successful ones  must commit to a very small set of roles and goals, often one role and one goal. Even where roles and goals differ and conflict, they tend to be set up as binary opposites or at least draw from the same well of constraints and affordances.

This is in large part, again, because games must be closed functioning systems: each part must connect to every other part. So a game cannot represent roles and goals well that do not fit into the core choices, affordances, and constraints of the chosen problem space.

Slaves in the game become a commodity, a valuable source of cheap labor and it is not unreasonable at all for players to initiate battles in the hopes of gaining more slaves for mines and building projects.

Suppose, however, one wanted to criticize formally this historical representation of slaves. One might start by noting that these slaves have very little agency.

slaves become nothing more than affordances, resources for the player to exploit in the game

Why does the game not portray the agency of slaves? How Longbow defined the primary problem space, the human player’s problem space, is a critical answer. For the player Philip king of Macedon is the role with a goal of uniting Macedonia and building a Balkan empire. With this role and goal driving the articulation of the problem space, depicting slaves in the game as affordances is fully understandable.

It is important to note, however, that saying a portrayal of ancient slaves, native Americans, Hessian mercenaries, railroad barons or any other agent or aspect of the past, takes the form it does because of the problem space is not meant to be a tactic for ending discussion or defending an implementation (one could imagine such a chilling effect: “why are they portrayed this way? Because the problem space demanded it. Oh … okay, so what’s for lunch?”). It is meant to focus criticism on a game holistically and consider how the affordances and constraints of the simulation game medium and the interests and goals of a game’s creators (their concerns, assumptions, hopes, attitudes, what have you) shape a game’s interpretation of the past.

the agents could not reasonably be conceived to play that role  in the problem space from the point of view of the player, the primary agent

simulation games are human interpretations of the past subject to certain constraints, as sources and media they should be considered holistically, and this can be done by thinking in terms of problem spaces.

Players with choices and strategies

Affordances and constraints: Agents in the past (and present) have opportunities and roadblocks, abundances and scarcities, talents and weaknesses, access and exclusion. These affordances and constraints shape their choices, goals, and roles.

make notes on the following: role, goals, geographical setting, types of choices available, affordances (I didn’t call them that at first, but got there quickly), and constraints.

I indicated I would start the class off by giving some background biographical information on Pliny.

Comprehension: even those who sometimes struggled with the challenge of making sense of primary sources and organizing a variety of historical evidence reported their sense that they understood Pliny and his world better than they normally understood many topics we explored

t is too easy for evidence and facts (such as they are) to get divorced from one another and appear meaningless, particularly when one lacks a deep background in a subject.

Engagement: problem solving is inherently engaging

what reasonably valid simulation games offer most of all to students of the past is the ability to explore problem spaces from the strategic, if not emotional and intellectual, perspective of a player/agent in the space.

Simulation games are particularly good at modeling choice in problem spaces.

When students play and critique simulation games, they can actually make choices within a problem space and see how they are resolved.

potentially a much closer analogy to the reality of the past problem than regular classroom media

Of course we must be very careful when using simulation games to help students study problem spaces. The games will tend to focus on one set of roles and goals in the problem space and it is essential to remind students that there are many roles and goals.

Critiques of particular historical films were assumed to be indicative of some kind of basic structural inability of film to function as a mode of historical expression. Many scholars concluded that film could not constitute “proper history.”

the notion of “accuracy” or “truth” is collapsed with and thus taken to mean, “in alignment with the narratives of book-history.”

Obviously the aim of the developers of historical videogames like Civilization or Brothers in Arms (in addition to create an entertaining game), is to create history, not as it can be represented in a book but as it can be represented in a videogame.

Most often these narratives are used as the benchmark for establishing truth or accuracy and thus, the examination of content

These written interpretations are taken to be history (or more accurately, the past) itself, rather than history as it can be written, which naturally cannot be bluntly compared to history as it can be played

history on film must be considered on its own terms.

Examining only content also necessarily involves asking questions about what is included or left out of a particular videogame’s representation. This is rarely a useful question beyond the basis of a general common sense. Historical videogames are, like all histories, mimetic cultural products

The benefit will be more than just increased knowledge of a particular historical representation, but also insights about form (a particular game-structure’s operations) that are transferable to an understanding of games with similar ludic (and audio-visual) elements.

Historical videogames must be understood on their own terms, without relinquishing our understanding of the basic tenets of historical theory as they universally apply to history as a practice within any form (e.g. history is referential and representational).

Accepting this challenge requires a new approach to historical videogames, one that involves analysing the structures that produce meaning.

though written logically, are still subjective aesthetics that attempt to represent historical experience through reactively producing signs to be read and responses to be acted upon.

In short, in any historical videogame, the aesthetics of historical description also function at a ludic level, producing a form of “procedural rhetoric” that, depending on a particular game’s (or genre’s) structures, can influence virtually all of the other historical signifiers through which the game produces meaning.

Having identified combinations of these audio-visual-ludic structures, we can then approach other games that operate similarly with an understanding of what opportunities for historical meaning-making they are likely to offer

When we look at the videogame form in this way we can, I hope, begin to create a cohesive understanding of how games represent the past and what structures create particular playful opportunities for players to explore, understand, and interact with these representations.

Drawing on interviews we conducted with game developers in Canada

In addition to looking at how game labour is mobilised in commercial game development, we also consider in this article how game labour is counter-mobilised – dissident directions that are emerging in the subjectivities, organisation, and creations of this form of new media labour.

tactical games created in the context of political activism

a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana – a promise of being paid to play

experiments in open-source game development

our inquiry into the composition of game labour is part of a longer study of computer and video games. Our study proposes that interactive games are the paradigmatic media of “Empire”, using that term in the inflection given to it by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their companion books, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004).

the five reasons we think digital games are exemplary creations of Empire

he largest game firms and markets are located in the United States, Japan, and Europe, though South Korea and China are quickly becoming burgeoning regions of game-capital’s expansion

the corporate organisation of the game industry spans the “world market” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 254-256). Game companies roam the entire planet in search of workers and consumers, establishing a globe-girdling network of production and consumption.

Early digital games were created during the Cold War by hackers and hobbyists within the military-academic complex. The creations of this autonomous invention power were only later harnessed by entrepreneurs – the act of capture that set in motion a multi-billion dollar cultural industry (Kline et al., 2003: 86-88). Since its inception, the digital play industry has continually discovered profitable new strategies by capturing counter-play.

The concept of immaterial labour invites us to assess the multitudinous potentialities of the new forms of work

digital games are a paradigmatic media of Empire

The activity of making and playing games combines the range of qualitative features of immaterial labour: scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, human sociability, and cooperative interactivity

The transnational architecture of game production reminds us that the world market may be a “smooth” space but it’s far from level

A concept such as immaterial labour, for example, enables us to defamiliarise interactive play, reconceive it, and glimpse aspects that are often occluded

By examining game work in terms of immaterial labour we can start to show how it relates to other aspects of this social field – participating, for instance, both in the structures of “networked power” that uphold contemporary sovereignty, and the insurrections of the “multitude” that challenge it.

To draw an analogy to the music industry, the game publisher is like the record label, the developer like the band. Developers make games, while publishers finance, distribute, and market them.

Publishers include the colossal video game console-makers (Microsoft, with its Xbox, Nintendo, with its GameCube, and Sony, with its PlayStation II), a collection of transnational publishing conglomerates (e.g., Electronic Arts, THQ, UbiSoft), and a number of smaller but still powerful publishers.

tremendous control consolidating in the hands of one company in particular, Electronic Arts (EA).

it is not uncommon for publishers to cancel a development contract mid-way.

At the top are a handful of mammoth developers with between five hundred and over two thousand employees, releasing dozens of titles each year.

Below these is a stratum of mid-sized studios that enjoy an established record with one or more publishers, have more than one hundred employees, and release a couple of games each year.

In addition to operating their own in-house development studios, publishers contract “third-party” development studios to make games for their publishing label

One studio manager describes the power relationship of a developer to a publisher as ‘indentured servitude’.

developers are ‘the David; the publisher is the Goliath’

Then there is an echelon of small studios with less than one hundred employees, producing one game every eighteen months or so, often scrambling from one contract to the next.

game development is an exemplary site of “immaterial labour”

This term is used by autonomist theorists to designate the ‘distinctive quality’ of work in ‘the epoch in which information and communication play an essential role in each stage of the process of production’

Hardt and Negri (2000: 289-294) distinguish various sub-categories of immaterial labour, including work with computers and networks, work manipulating and managing emotion, work involving communication and images, and work entailing high levels of coordination and cooperation

The net of immaterial labour is cast widely: bio-tech lab technicians and game designers – as much as call centre operators, childcare providers, and even virtual game players – are engaged in immaterial labour

Programmers, or engineers, develop “game engines” and write the code on which a game’s functionality is based

We want to stress that digital games are “immaterial” commodities and they may be designed by “immaterial” labourers – but at some point in the production chain some unmistakably material labour is required, producing a tangible good, whether that be a game cartridge or a game console.

we focus our attention on the labour at the “high” immaterial end of the game value chain in the North, and the unique forms of incentive and discipline it incites

the day of the lone-wolf commercial game developer is definitively over

Most big games cost $5-10 million to produce, and $25 million budgets are ‘around the corner’

Designers establish the basic game concept, characters, and play mechanics.

The main job types in game development include design, production, art, programming, and testing

Artists develop characters, virtual worlds, animation, special effects, and sound.

Today’s most visible immaterial workers are those in high-tech milieu and in cultural industries

Producers have a “leadership role” in administering the budget, coordinating the project, and managing the development team; they are charged with maintaining a coherent vision of the game’s design, facilitating communication among the sub-teams, and addressing “personnel and motivational issues”. Finally, testers play a game to evaluate it for “bugs” and playability

Game development typically involves four stages. In “pre-production” the conceptual infrastructure for the game is designed, its look mapped, schedules created, and resources assigned. In “prototyping” programmers create the tools that build the game, and the rendering tools which iterate animation or special effects, permitting artists to design, review, and edit their creations. Artists are working on two- and three-dimensional models, developing textures, and animation for characters and the game world, while software engineers code the game mechanics and the story. The third stage is “production”, with its sub-stages of alpha, beta, and final. Game engines are now complete, and characters and animation are embedded in a working game. At “alpha” the game isn’t fully stable, but all the art, code, and features are present. Testers are evaluating levels, and returning them for correction to the development team. At “beta” the game should be full and stable, adapted to the “platform” it will play on, and it is undergoing play testing. At “final” the product is shipped to the publisher, who will run its own tests before approving a game for release

The empirical basis for the analysis that follows is a three-year study of the Canadian video and computer game industry. We conducted personal interviews with about forty games workers, including producers, artists, programmers, designers, testers, studio executives, and owners

Comparable to the Australian situation, the Canadian game industry is a small but significant node in the global digital play business

a preliminary profile can be drawn: relatively young, generally well paid but unevenly precarious, and overwhelmingly male

The largest proportion of the game workforce is between their late-teens and early-thirties, a generational bracket that jives with the twenty-nine year-old age of the “average” gamer

many new recruits to game jobs hold college or university degrees in areas such as computer science, physics, and fine arts

There are few university-level specialised game programs, though in 2004 EA – a company that sees ‘universities as the next-generation of talent’ – donated US$8 million to help launch just such a program (Rueff cited in Delaney, 2004)

Celebrity” designers can earn $500,000 or more; programmers and artists, about $60,000; and game-testers are often paid minimum wage

There are, however, a growing number of developers setting up in smaller towns, due to the growing supply of skilled labour and the lure of reduced overhead costs – including lower wages.

The game workforce is, by and large, male.

Even if there has been a shift in the gender of game players, ‘there’s not much of a change in hiring numbers

The verdict of most women insiders is scathing: ‘It’s a total old boys club’

Projects to explore paths beyond the gender clichés in virtual game content ‘do not get support in the industry at all…. [Y]ou have a really dominant gender leading and they’re the ones who have the purse strings’.

There’s nobody telling you how to do something. There’s no paperwork getting in your way. There are no set rules that you have to follow – rules that you don’t feel are necessary. There’s no formal way that you are supposed to do a technical design.

We have very little hierarchy, very little formal structure, very little “understood” ways of doing things…. In a situation where everyone more or less knows their role, it works out well: everyone just divides the work, you work on your bit, and everyone knows what to do. It just works out.

To function smoothly, though, a smooth, open play of communication is required.

Cooperation within and among the sub-groups of a development team is cited by game workers as a most gratifying aspect of their work

Software is a very dynamic, huge system: this is something I find attractive about the games industry. You have all these different components: artists, programmers, legal, production, data. You’ve got all these people that don’t understand each other’s jobs. And (yet) you have to make that all come together as one cohesive piece of art.

The work as play milieu of contemporary game studios spans a varying range of perks and promises: flexible hours, lax dress code, free food, fitness facilities, parties, and funky interior design; and it also encompasses a host of intangible qualities, from “rebelliousness” to twisted humour to self-expression.

Generally, when you go to work, it’s not, “Ah, I gotta go to work”. It’s, “I’m going to work, cool!” You come in, you see your friends, you get to make video games, and you get to play some. It’s pretty cool. It’s really not even so much like work here.

‘industrialization of bohemia’ – in particular the idea that games corporations aren’t actually part of the ‘corporate world’

To tap this “jaded intelligence” game studios tend to elaborate a work as play ethos that promises great ‘leeway to express yourself’: ‘People have to be entirely comfortable to be who they are to come up with anything spontaneously, to have that real dynamic’

he “anti-corporate” culture of many game studios would seem to be exemplary of McRobbie’s (2002: 109) incisive critique that, in creative workplaces, ‘[w]hen the individual is most free to be chasing his or her dreams of self-expression, so also is postmodern power at its most effective’.

Another reason studios bend to a work as play model is because many companies have a recruitment and retention problem.

various disciplinary mechanisms are employed so to say to staff: ‘Oh my God, you don’t want to leave here!’ The campus-like Vancouver-area studio of EA provides a striking example. Employing 1000 people, the sleekly designed complex features a gym, pool tables, basketball courts, a soccer field, subsidised gourmet food, and snowboarding fieldtrips, among other “bonuses”.

Studio executives are anxious to not only attract new youthful employees but also prevent current team-members from leaving midway through the production schedule, or defecting to a competing studio or another industry.

The length of the working day in game studios varies widely depending on company, rank, and stage of development

studios open their doors to extreme hours of digital drudgery: ‘forced workaholism’ is the diagnosis in IGDA’s recent study of Quality of Life in the Game Industry

Most North American developers are salaried, so the extraordinary overtime put in at game studios is unpaid labour.

The personal accounts we received give every indication that studio workplaces are, with varying degrees of intensity, obsessively hard-driving and punishingly disassociated from domesticity, sleep, and nourishment.

EA employees report that ‘work inside the company more resembles a fast-moving, round-the-clock auto assembly line’

At least one manager we talked to was deeply critical of studios that get these young guys that come out of film school, game programming school, or art school and get them to work their asses off….If I had a dime for all the people I knew who are sort of resentful of their experience at their first or subsequent game industry job because the corporate culture was very subtly coercive: “You should be working here at 8:00 at night and, if you aren’t, then you’re slacking off!”

This ruthless work regimen reflects and reinforces divisions based on age, gender, and parenthood. Those in long-term relationships, those who have children or want to start a family, or those who simply don’t want to reduce the time of life to time spent at work, are ostensibly excluded from the game sector, or will find it tremendously difficult to commit to the ludicrous hours that can be expected of them

Enduring excessive hours without complaint is tied to the game industry’s ‘hard work ethic’ (IGDA, 2004a: 31), which we would add has a machismo quality to it that joins the other manifestations of sexism that have functioned to exclude women from working in game studios

Here we catch a view of the demanding practices of self-regulation in game studios, an aspect of Empire’s search for ways of realising ‘unmediated command over subjectivity itself’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 135; see also McRobbie, 2004). Consider this developer’s remarks: When you work in this industry you are judged for what you’ve done. So you want to make a good name for yourself. You want people to consider you a hard worker, a good worker – a guy that can do a bit more than what’s expected. Because the thing with the game industry is that it is, really, a small business.

Stress is a major problem in development studios. Referring to the exhausting rhythm of work, one game artist comments: ‘I don’t think it’s good for you to work like that, that often. And to be creative all the time without a break – it just isn’t good for your brain, or for your creativity, potentially’

The turnover rate in the game industry is described as ‘nothing short of catastrophic’: over 50% plan to leave the industry within ten years, 35% within five years

‘Normally, you sign a contract of employment with a company and any idea you have becomes theirs’

any studios are rife with quiet suspicion about ideas being ‘stolen’

The five had signed “non-compete” agreements and this legally blocked them from working for another North American games company for one year after terminating their employment. A court judged in favour of UbiSoft.

It seems that UbiSoft thinks of Montréal as a plantation – any worker who dares to escape will be hunted down by lawyers and forced out of business’

[p]retty much everyone would rather be working on their own project, some original and creative game’.

game workers’ disenchantment with the effects of corporate rationalisation on creativity is often what causes developers to leave their employer – often to launch a start-up.

In terms of precarity, one segment of game labour that stands out is “bug catchers”. Game testers, or Quality Assurance (QA) employees, are notorious for being the lowest paid and worst treated workers in the studio system:

Many testers make a minimum wage, and at larger developers, are in temporary, contract-based employment. ‘We’re treated no differently than the janitorial or the cafeteria staff, who make more money than us anyway. I’m not belittling other jobs but…’, one tester explains

A lot of the QA testers are very angry, because they’ll hear that their bug count isn’t as “high”. But it isn’t fair because certain areas of the game just don’t have any bugs’. One tester says his department is filled with ‘really angry people, because you work fourteen-hour days and we save each game probably millions of dollars

game studios begin to experiment in “outsourcing”.

as high-technology capitalism rips its course round the world in search of new markets and “cheap” labour, “talent” begins to incubate in the Global South, giving game-capital increased mobility

EA, for example, outsources development work to India (Overby, 2003); and EA, Nintendo, and Microsoft, among others, have outsourced game work to a Vietnamese firm

But the diffusion of game labour is presenting game corporations with not only discounted but also free labour.

when young “hardcore” gamers spend their evenings modding a level of a computer game, or sculpting an avatar for a multiplayer virtual world – or, for that matter, contributing to their favourite developer’s online “community” forum – the boundaries between “play” and “content provision” subtly dissolve. They join the legion of ‘free labor’

a major source of value creation in the networked economy, as capital learns to digitally tap, outside all boundaries of work-time or -place, a diffuse “collective intelligence”

Now development companies often “buy back” successful mods, and hire the teams that created them en masse

What’s more, best-selling games like Counter-Strike have been developed by remote modding teams, establishing a profitable precedent of a “virtual studio” model of game development. In that aspect, and in the modes of distributed content provision evidenced by the mod community, free networked labour in the gaming sector is perhaps prototypical of work in what has been dubbed the coming ‘firms without factories’

‘eighty-five hour’ work weeks at EA; of the normalisation of hyper-extended ‘crunch’ time; of the absence of compensation in the form of either ‘overtime’ pay or ‘compensation time’; of the ‘put up or shut up and leave human resources policy’ of EA; of the allegedly ‘illegal’ failure of EA to pay overtime; and of the rapid concentration of ownership in the game development industry.

The reverberations of ‘EA: The Human Story’ are only beginning to register as we write this article. At minimum, as one industry commentator put it, ‘the general perception of EA’s overall sliminess has increased exponentially’

managers regularly ‘falsified timesheets to avoid paying overtime’

IGDA’s gambit, for example, is that studios that reduce their hours will get ‘more productive and creative workers’

And only because it is being forced to, EA is promising workplace ‘reform’

Generally, though, game studios in North America are very far, culturally and politically, and often geographically, from the traditions of trade unionism

These resonate in many respects with the counter-globalisation movement, for example, in an opposition to the commodification of life forms, in a commitment to experiment in alternative modes of human cooperation, and in the elaboration of non-commercial applications of new media

The counter-mobilisation of immaterial labour that currently causes industry managers most anxiety is the growing network of game pirates

games have a piracy rate of nearly five times that of the music industry

pirated product often springs from within development studios themselves.