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Christina Stokes

Small Assignment #2 - 74 views

I think it's a good idea too, however I'm not sure how we would implement this this late in the semester. It might be a bit tight to do this kind of peer-review presentation for the visual analysis...

digh5000 smallassignment2 evaluation

started by Devin Hartley on 10 Feb 14 18 follow-ups, last by Christina Stokes on 08 Mar 14
Chris Milando

» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky - 3 views

www.shirky.com/...apster-udacity-and-the-academy

digh5000 dh MOOC udacity online education

shared by Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? How did they achieve such a decisive victory over Napster, then fail to regain control of even legal distribution channels?
  • Hey kids, Alanis Morisette just recorded three kickin’ songs! You can have them, so long as you pay for the ten mediocrities she recorded at the same time.
  • Napster told us a different story. Napster said “You want just the three songs? Fine.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
  • Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.
  • 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,
  • As most critics do, Edmundson focussed on the issue of quality, asking and answering his own question: “[C]an online education ever be education of the very best sort?”
  • “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.
  • The large lecture isn’t a tool for producing intellectual joy; it’s a tool for reducing the expense of introductory classes.
  • 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.
  • And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we’ve never had a good way of publishing lectures.
  • 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?
  • The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
  • 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.
  • In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.
  • 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.”
  • For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better. And once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrollment.
  • Open systems are open.
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14
       
      I really like this point. I want to eventually host my own online course, and I think it would be great to have criticism! I come from a writing background, so I know how powerful and wonderful criticism can be. I was in a writers circle a few years ago and we used to completely tear down each other's work. But when we rewrote our stories (with their criticism in mind), they were /always/ much stronger than they had ever been. For something like a massive online course to work, it has to work /well/, so if criticsm can help bring it to the level of quality it needs (to provide the justification for its existence), then that is what we need to employ! I, for one, welcome criticism in everything that I do (so long as it is constructive). The only way to improve is through criticism, and as literary scholars - whose degrees are based on criticizing the work of others - I find it very odd (and wrong) that we cannot take criticism of our own work.
  • 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.
Danuta Sierhuis

DIGH 5000 Jan 20 Libraries, Archives and Databases - 28 views

When Christina mentioned that the article she was looking for on Hacking the Academy archive no longer existed, I thought about the issues that digital preservation programs in archives and museums...

started by Christina Stokes on 22 Jan 14 6 follow-ups, last by Danuta Sierhuis on 27 Jan 14
Chris Milando

Highlights for Gibbs and Owens': Writing History in the Digital Age » Hermene... - 0 views

writinghistory.trincoll.edu/...gibbs-owens-2012-spring

digh5000 history data education play generate

shared by Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • historical scholarship increasingly depends on our interactions with data, from battling the hidden algorithms of Google Book Search to text mining a hand-curated set of full-text documents.
  • Even though methods for exploring and interacting with data have begun to permeate historical research, historians’ writing has largely remained mired in traditional forms and conventions
  • In this essay we consider data as computer-processable information.
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • Examples include discussions of data queries, workflows with particular tools, and the production and interpretation of data visualizations
  • 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
  • This chapter discusses some new ways in which historians might rethink the nature of historical writing as both a product and a process of understanding.
  • The process of guiding should be a greater part of our historical writing.
  • 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
  • What does it mean to “use” data in historical work?
  • For one, it does not refer only to historical analysis via complex statistical methods to create knowledge.
  • We should be clear about what using data does not imply.
  • 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.
  • data does not always have to be used as evidence
  • knowledge from visualizations as not simply “transferred, revealed, or perceived, but…created through a dynamic process.
  • Data in a variety of forms can provoke new questions and explorations, just as visualizations themselves have been recently described as “generative and iterative, capable of producing new knowledge through the aesthetic provocation
  • It can also help with discovering and framing research questions.
  • using large amounts of data for research should not be considered opposed to more traditional use of historical sources.
  • humanists will find it useful to pivot between distant and close readings
  • 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
  • historical writing has been largely confined by linear narratives, usually in the form of journal articles and monographs
  • easier than ever for historians to combine different kinds of datasets—and thus provide an exciting new way to triangulate historical knowledge
  • The insistence on creating a narrative in static form, even if online, is particularly troubling because it obscures the methods for discovery that underlie the hermeneutic research process.
  • 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.
  • This means using appropriate platforms to explain our methods.
  • 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.
  • We need history writing that interfaces with, explains, and makes accessible the data that historians use
  • the reasons why many historians remain skeptical about data are not all that different from the reasons they can be skeptical about text.
  • We need history writing that will foreground the new historical methods to manipulate text/data coming online, including data queries and manipulation, and the production and interpretation of visualizations.
  • Beyond explicit tutorials, there are several key advantages in foregrounding our work with data:
  • It allows others to verify historical claims;
  • In addition to accelerating research, foregrounding methodology and (access to) data gives rise to a constellation of questions that are becoming increasingly relevant for historians.
  • 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.
  • Dave Perry in his blog post “Be Online or Be Irrelevant” suggests that academic blogging can encourage “a digital humanism which takes down those walls and claims a new space for scholarship and public intellectualism.”14 This cannot happen unless our methodologies with data remain transparent.
  • we should embrace more public modes of writing and thinking as a way to challenge the kind of work that scholars do.
  • Google’s data is proprietary and exactly what comprises it is unclear
  • Perhaps more importantly, this graph does not indicate anything interesting about why the term “user” spiked as it did—the real question that historians want to answer.
  • But these are not reasons to discard the tool or to avoid writing about it
  • Historians might well start framing research questions this way, with quick uses of the Ngram viewer or other tools
  • 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
  • Exposed data allow us to approach interesting questions from multiple and interdisciplinary points of view in the way that citations to textual sources do not
  • As it becomes easier and easier for historians to explore and play with data it becomes essential for us to reflect on how we should incorporate this as part of our research and writing practices.
  • 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
  • The ease and increasing presence of data, in terms of both digitized and increasingly born digital research materials, mean that—irrelevant of historical field—the historian faces new methodological challenges.
  • Approaching these materials in a context sensitive way requires substantial amounts of time and energy devoted to how exactly we can interpret data
  • we have argued that historians should deliberately and explicitly share examples of how they are finding and manipulating data in their research with greater methodological transparency in order to promote the spirit of humanistic inquiry and interpretation.
  • 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.
  • To argue against the necessity of mathematical complexity is also to suggest that it is a mistake to treat data as self-evident or that data implicitly constitute historical argument or proof.
  • Working with data can be playful and exploratory, and useful techniques should be shared as readily as research discoveries
  • Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
     
    Gibbs and Owens explain that data and information need to be played with. "Data does not always have to be used as evidence" in itself - it can also be used as a springboard for questions and further discovery (data is "generative").
Alessandro Marcon

A short, worthwhile argument for the value of expert knowledge - 24 views

I'm really glad both of you, Danuta and Jordon, weighed in on this.To be honest, I was stuck in a kind of squirming spot between agreeing with and being irked by this article, but more so than agre...

started by Alessandro Marcon on 12 Feb 14 3 follow-ups, last by Alessandro Marcon on 23 Feb 14
Christina Stokes

Small Assignment #1 - 25 views

The text analysis tools selected are Voyant and AntConc. These tools were mentioned on Shawn Graham's website "The Historian's Macroscope of Big Digital History." Initially I wanted to conduct a te...

started by Devin Hartley on 03 Feb 14 6 follow-ups, last by Christina Stokes on 06 Feb 14
Ridha Ben Rejeb

BigBlue Button Open Access Project - 2 views

These are excerpts from the article: Online education has the potential to provide students everywhere with access to the best teachers, the best course materials and the best learning environment...

DH Education DevlopmentProject community collaboration distance edcuation

started by Ridha Ben Rejeb on 29 Apr 14 no follow-up yet
Ridha Ben Rejeb

Textual Analysis tools beyond the technical pecularities - 10 views

Following last week's class topic Text and Discourse Analysis, I thought to invigorate the discussion around this particular topic of interest , given my academic background in applied linguistics ...

started by Ridha Ben Rejeb on 10 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
Christina Stokes

How to create a helpful Q&A forum for class and the wider DH community! - 7 views

Hi DIGH 5000, One of the great things about our class is that we all have different levels of experience using different tools assigned for each week.Unfortunately I am less experienced than most ...

started by Christina Stokes on 26 Feb 14 no follow-up yet
Chris Milando

Highlights for de Peuter and Dyer-Witherford article: Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising... - 0 views

five.fibreculturejournal.org/ilising-immaterial-game-labour

game labour digh5000 digital humanities video games capitalism

shared by Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • article
  • This article is a preliminary portrait of work in the video and computer game development industry, a sector of creative, cognitive labour that exemplifies the allure of new media work
  • there are promising signs of game designers and audiences creatively reorienting their playful dispositions and intellectual capacities toward the subversion of the very logics of expropriation, commodification, and corporatisation that sustain the digital play industry in particular and global capital in general.
  • ...151 more annotations...
  • this article examines the conditions of digital game labour, this cultural industry’s “work as play” mantra, the pleasures and potentialities of game production, the blemishes that mar this attractive vista, and the new infractions these tensions provoke
  • 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).
  • Our hypothesis is that digital games are produced by and productive of the multi-layered arrangement of military, economic, and subjective forces associated with the form of imperial power theorised by Hardt and Negri
  • 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
  • The storylines, missions, and emotionality of countless video and computer games express and reinforce the military, economic, and political logics of Empire
  • America’s Army, with its recruitment and training goals, The Sims, with its simulation of extreme consumerism, Impossible Creatures, with its bio-engineering experiments, and Vice City: Grand Theft Auto, with its cynicism and violence are virtualities produced by and productive of Empire
  • digital games are a paradigmatic media of Empire
  • Digital games exemplify Empire’s mobilisation of “immaterial labour”
  • non-commercial, dissident applications of digital play have emerged in the context of the counter-globalisation movement – from feminist game art to game-inspired experiments in distributed counter-planning
  • Immaterial game labour also reveals the blurring of work and non-work time
  • 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
  • discontented game workers have recently ignited controversy around exploitive practices, like excessive hours, that are common in “cool” media industries.
  • 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
  • The concept of Empire and the discussions surrounding it, provide, we argue, a rich and coherent – although also eminently debatable – depiction of post-Fordist, transnationalised capitalism
  • 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.
  • Publishers exert massive influence over what games are made and when, largely because of their control of financing and marketing levers
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
       
      Super Important!
  • tremendous control consolidating in the hands of one company in particular, Electronic Arts (EA).
  • Publishing is the site for strategic control in the games sector because their marketing campaigns – which today account for as much as a third of a game’s total costs – command the all-important distribution bottleneck, influencing what games actually make it to a store shelf.
  • 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
  • Finally, there are innumerable start-ups – typically digital “garage” operations developing prototype games in the hope of getting a publishing deal. Many, perhaps most, perish.
  • Developers are significantly disadvantaged in relation to publishers, to whom all but the largest or most famous studios relinquish creative control and intellectual property rights
  • 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
  • Intensely cooperative, the labour of developing a single game can evolve over a period of between six and twenty-four months, and involve teams of between twenty-five and one hundred people.
  • 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
  • Canada hosts a number of renowned developers, like BioWare Corp. and Relic Entertainment; several multinational mega-publishers, like EA and Rockstar Games, operate (and buy out) studios in Canada; and the cities of Montréal and Vancouver are internationally recognised metropolitan hubs of game creation
  • The Canadian game sector mainly services publishers based in the United States and Europe who want to take advantage of a lower-valued Canadian currency, a skilled labour force, and, in Montréal especially, attractive government subsidies
  • 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’.
  • Creative expression, cooperative activity, and a “playful” environment arose again and again in our interviews as prime sources of enjoyment in game work.
  • the prospect of achieving this independence – let alone actually realising an “original” idea – is increasingly difficult in a risk-averse industry that prefers formula to experimentation. Yet the possibility of that creative autonomy arrests the imagination and secures the loyalty of countless aspiring developers.
  • 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.
  • Game developers often talked about space for creative freedom in relation to their studio’s “flat” organisational structure, which seems to be most common in small to mid-size studios. ‘There’s little bureaucracy. It’s just people doing their thing to make good games’, explains one programmer. Others stress the self-organised character of the collaborative process:
  • 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.
  • A third pleasure of game development is what we call the work as play ethos – a central strategy deployed by game-capital to mobilise immaterial game labour.
  • 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.
  • studios bend to a work as play model in part because singularity and openness is understood to facilitate the flow of creativity
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
       
      Super important! Theme: Creativity requires play
  • Creation is only possible when there’s a certain type of confidence, of friendliness and cooperation between the people who are participating in the work
  • ‘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 above-discussed dimensions of the labour of game development – the capture of human creativity, the high level of cooperation, the re-making of work as play – resonate strongly with the hypothesis of Paolo Virno (2004: 110) that post-Fordist production is, in a profound paradox, the ‘communism of capital’.
  • Our interviews showed that developers initially delighted by their “work as play” jobs often found that the very factors that first appear so attractive – individual autonomy, flexibility, “cool” corporate culture, and even playing games – had a dark side. We turn now to instances where the logic of work as play breaks down, revealing varieties of play slaves and a ratcheting of corporate drone
  • 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’
  • In Canada, EA has been an active lobbyist against attempts to regulate hours in high-tech industry.
  • One computer science professor who spent a semester-long “residency” at EA reports that the game giant – which he describes as a ‘ruthless meritocracy’ – prefers to hire young students directly from university not only because of their up-to-date technological know-how but also because of their discounted salaries and heightened ‘idealism’
  • 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!”
  • interest of game companies in extracting more labour for less from their workers. Another factor is the nature of the revenue model that keeps most third-party development studios afloat: a developer receives a payment when they meet a “milestone” set with their publisher, normally triggered when a developer dispatches a component part of the final game product. Developers with a hit game behind them may be able to negotiate tolerable deadlines, but vulnerable start-ups and small studios – in a deeply competitive business – often can’t. ‘Sometimes companies are just so intent on getting that contract that they’ll promise anything – at the expense of these poor programmers who have to make the bloody thing’.
  • 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’
  • ‘No one is doing any original games’. Another start-up developer remarks: ‘the industry is making so much money selling established product, there seems to be very little incentive to break out of it and try new stuff’.
  • [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
  • a Vietnamese programmer could make about $4000 a year, whereas ‘comparable US talent would earn $70,000-$100,000′
  • But the diffusion of game labour is presenting game corporations with not only discounted but also free labour.
  • Over the last decade or so, “authoring tools” have been increasingly packaged with computer games, helping to foster a vibrant participatory culture of game “modding”, or modification. “Modders” deploy a range of techniques, from changing characters’ appearances – “skins” – and weapons, to designing new scenarios, levels, or missions, up to radical departures that amount to building a whole new game – a “total conversion” – using various authoring tools
  • 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’
  • More substantially, the game industry’s “work as play” mantra is suffering a devastating blow of truth, and game workers have started to rethink their conditions of labour.
  • 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
  • unionisation might provide game workers with a form of self-management that extends to greater control over game content, thereby responding to the desire – expressed so often by game workers – to work on ‘more creative projects’
  • four lines of counter-mobilisation involving the immaterial subjectivities that make and play virtual games: digital piracy, autonomous production, tactical games, and simulated counter-planning.
  • 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.
  • Empire sets in motion potentialities it cannot contain
  • Modders often import content for an altered game from some other pop culture artefact – either from another game, perhaps owned by a company other than the one that made the original game, or from another media, such as a film. In doing this, these modders are constructing a “commons” of images, characters, and themes, in violation of the corporate enclosures that divide them up into carefully policed proprietary domains.
  • Modding, like piracy, carries both potentialities and limitations. Usurping the corporate control over the direction of game development, modders are intriguing figures of autonomous production
  • In other words, modifications don’t necessarily modify much, often only amplifying the spirit of the original game
  • The wide diffusion of game-making know-how, and the availability of easy to use authoring devices, such as Flash, has led to a spate of alternative games that contribute to the circulation and provocation of struggles associated with feminist, counter-globalisation, and anti-war movements
  • But is it possible to envisage more radical horizons for interactive games where they might make a contribution to an “escape option” that would build another, more just and equitable, society? Perhaps.
  • As military training camps and management schools constantly demonstrate, networked simulation is not just a matter of entertainment.
  • But how might capacities for virtual rehearsal and planning be linked to radical social agendas?
  • ‘agoraXchange’, a collaborative open-source game development and art project, has the goal of creating a massively multiplayer online game simulating a future where there has been a radical change in political institutions.
  • The experiments of this playful multitude, as modest and preliminary as some may be, flow into the wider currents of tactical media, hacktivism, free and open-source software, and distributed computing generating tumults throughout the circuits of Empire
  • The ideology of work as fun has given game-capital an effective but increasingly brittle formula for containing and channeling the biopolitical powers of its immaterial workforce
  • but there may yet prove to be more “play” in the system than game-capital ever imagined.
  • Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
     
    Quick summary: de Peuter and Dyer-Witherford explore the issues with the video game industry, and explain how capitalism controls what is made and limits game developers' creativity. 
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