POLITICAL ECONOMY
So I really see it as being the developer that is being squeezed. So costs have gone up, number of people have gone up, cost to the consumer hasn‟t gone up, something has got to give and it has been giving and that is why there has been an awful lot of consolidation in industries, a lot of companies going under.”
• •
How did this game come to be in the world? What pressures determined that it would be as it is?
•
What kind of passions sustained the creative effort that goes into the production of any computer game?
There is in fact very little space to exercise creative freedom in the decisions about what kind of products they work on. The determinations of the market, financing your product and bringing it to consumers, exercise a powerful logic that takes its own particular shape in each studio.
Political economy and the margins of choice
• Most producers, most of the time, in most cultural industries have very little margin of choice about what they make.
How are my gameplay pleasures already structured by the decisions of the producers?
•
• •
Pivotal Games‟ Production case study Winter2003/4. Pivotal – medium size studio (70 designers) – Bath UK.
WHY AM I IN VIETNAM ?
A COMPUTER GAME CASE STUDY „AESTHETICS OF PLAY‟
1. mixing the yellow with the pink
Video clip - 10mb/3min (requires Windows Media Player 9 or later)
•
•
Four days workplace observations
Ten, one hour long interviews with a cross section of the production team from game testers to the Managing Director.
•
•
Hale Waihona Puke POLITICAL ECONOMY
Pivotal Technical Director
“Even if you have got a million pounds in the bank and that is very rare, you quite simply just can‟t function. We used to create games with just sort of seven or ten people and now it genuinely is thirty to forty people plus and I don‟t think we are particularly big. But the cost of the games hasn‟t gone up by anything like the same amount, arguably it has gone down.
POLITICAL ECONOMY
Playstation 1 games used to cost thirty, forty pounds and that is what they cost today, ten years on. So the retailers are pretty much making the same margins as they used to. The publishers have got greater overheads,the market place has got bigger, it is more international, you have to distribute, sub-contract, so their costs have gone up.
Tastes and Technicities
• BUT … Knowing that a studio has to ship a million units and keep a staff of 70 on the payroll does not explain how it comes to produce a squad based military shooter set in Vietnam, as opposed to a racing game or a fantasy role play.