On the Back of a Flying Gryphon: Soaring Over/Through the Global Game Industry

After more than thirty years as a thing that can be called “an industry,” the video-game industry now finds itself in its middle ages, as well as the object of critical and scholarly inquiry. The global game industry and the virtual game worlds it creates are sprawling, historically situated, socio-technical assemblages that continue to offer promise and peril to researchers. Too often, however, context and the link between game worlds and developer worlds go uninterrogated: a divide remains between the world of game creators and games/game worlds themselves. Research tends to focus exclusively on content or on production, with a few notable exceptions linking the two.

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. xxxvi+298. $20) undertakes a complex analysis of the game industry through the lens of “empire,” as read through Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (p. xx). In many respects, this account is the most effective, as it connects production and content through this framework, focusing on “immaterial labor” both inside the game production “engine” and throughout the “gameplay” worlds it produces.

The resulting text provides a theoretically rich and compelling analytic framework that draws the reader into the networked “immaterial” worlds of game producers and game worlds. At the same time, one is also left feeling as if one was “on the back of a flying gryphon” (p. 123), flying over the landscape of the global game industry. One cannot help but wonder what a more focused empirical lens might have brought the text. EA_Spouse, actual Electronic Arts Employees, China, Chinese World of Warcraft (WoW) gold farmers, and even brief historical accounts of technologies and regions collide in an account whose sheer breadth does seem to imply a kind of empire. Due to such breadth, a certain empirical depth is never reached. One feels ferried from site to site just when the story was getting interesting, rather than being allowed to gain enough context, historical or otherwise, to engage deeply with the overarching argument.

Further, the reader is left wondering whether the theme of empire emerged from the source material (I suspect it did), or was imposed upon the material. It is difficult to determine which was the case from the flow and structure of the text, yet it is an important question. If it was brought to the material by the author, then no matter how persuasive a reading of the game industry it is, one must ask if there are other, better readings. If it emerged from the material, on the other hand, then that needs to be foregrounded. In my own work with game developers I can certainly understand the reading of empire, but can also imagine alternative readings that are less pessimistic. The rise of independent game development, for example, suggests that the empire is no inflexible despotism, but a more adaptable kind of hegemony.

In contrast, Bonnie A. Nardi’s My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. 236. $28) and William Sims Bainbridge’s The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. 248. $28) focus almost exclusively on the sprawling virtual world of Azeroth and the game world of WoW. Each of these texts largely brackets the world of game production and game industry from its analysis, which is reasonable, given the depth in which both cover WoW. Oddly enough, they both, for reasons that are not clear, make continual comparisons of WoW to Second Life, which seems a poor analogy. Missions, raiding, and all the play that emerges in these texts occur within structures dictated by game designers. Each component demonstrates how truly distant WoW is from Second Life. Yet time and again Second Life serves as a referent, although other virtual world games...