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Oasis Lunch Time Talk: Understanding the Australian Videogame Field through Formal, Informal, and Embedded Gamemakers

Tampere University
LocationKanslerinrinne 1,
OASIS, Pinni B Building (2nd floor)
4.4.2019 9.00–11.00
Entrance feeFree of charge

CoE in Game Culture Studies presents a series of OASIS Lunch Time Talks.

Brendan Keogh:

Understanding the Australian Videogame Field through Formal, Informal, and Embedded Gamemakers

Videogame development is happening in increasingly diverse and translocal ecologies. Beyond the blockbuster studios of select North America, western European, and Japanese cities, videogame making happens in a range of local industries and scenes, at a wide variety of scales, and for a breadth of reasons. ‘The videogame industry’ as a concept does not sufficiently account for this spectrum of activities and identities.

In this talk, Brendan Keogh draws from extensive interviews and surveys conducted with Australian videogame makers to instead outline, following Bourdieu, 'a videogame field' as a concept that captures a broader range of identities and relationships. Within the videogame field he identifies formal, informal, and embedded gamemakers as three broad categories across which a number of ideological and practical tensions exist around creative autonomy, financial sustainability, and labour politics. By outlining key actors and debates among Australian videogame makers, this talk draws attention to the plurality of videogame making practices undertaken as cultural and economic activity.

Dr Brendan Keogh is an Australian Research Council fellow in the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology. He researches videogame development skill transferability across informal, formal, and embedded sectors.

His previous research has focused on the phenomenological and textual aspects of videogame play and culture. He is the author of A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (MIT Press, 2018) and Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops The Line (Stolen Projects, 2012), and has written extensively about the cultures and development practices of videogames for outlets such as Overland, The Conversation, Polygon, Edge, and Vice.
 

The event will be streamed and it is free and open to everyone. Welcome!

Organiser

CoE in Game Culture Studies