Making Media Course Slides 07
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Seventh of eight slidepacks for the course (and book) Making Media at the University of Amsterdam
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Making Media Course Slides 07
- 1. Making Media: Production, Practices and Professions • social media • digital games #makingmedia
- 3. • conventional IP production • vlogging / livestreaming • community interactivity • portfolio of business models
- 7. “I worked harder at this job than any job I’ve ever had because [...] I was always mining my life for content, so I was always on.”
- 12. .industry structure .crunchtime .workforce diversity .scandals .serious games .postmortems
- 18. • financial incentives • health/wellbeing • social/team bonding • development • physical workspace
- 19. • young, male, white industry • reliance on passion (autoplay) • not equal opportunity for all • diversity is important • spiral staircase careers • crunch issues • staff retention problems
- 26. “Culture is how many game studios defend destructive behaviors be it racism, sexism, abusive contracts, low pay, management excess. They set themselves up with powerful people who like the way things go, and the people who want things like bodily autonomy, work-life balance, proper pay, or respect are seen as troublemakers and ostracized for upsetting the culture. It’s also a very insular culture. If you want to get hired on, people will call their friends at your old studio, and once you have a rep for speaking out, goodbye any future positions.”
Editor's Notes
- 11 Work case studies – Looking at the digital media and game industries specifically. Readings: Chapters 27-28 and 31-32 from the Making Media textbook. Lecture date: March 11. 12 Meet & Greet – Angie Smets (executive producer Guerilla Games, makers of the “Killzone” series and “Horizon Zero Dawn”) and Michel Reilhac (head of Submarine Channel, former executive director of Arte France Cinema). Interview date: March 14.
- Social media entertainment is a rapidly formalizing proto-industry in which creators – influencers, YouTubers, vloggers, gameplayers – play a central role. They use a variety of platforms to engage with global fan communities for commercial and cultural value, and operate outside the traditional structures of legacy media. Creator management takes on many forms. the interdependency between the platforms, creators, and intermediary firms and professionals who assist with managing creator brands. In addition to conventional intellectual property (IP) production, creators typically engage in more discursive content creation featuring alternative social media formats and modalities, like vlogging and livestreaming. Content creation is complimented by community interactivity conducted through iterative and typically non-scalable practices of commenting, liking, sharing, sending direct messages, and more, depending on the platform’s networking affordance. To summarise, then: to their fans, YouTube stars feel more authentic and relatable than many traditional celebrities, and that’s something that is intrinsic to the videos they publish. The fact that this may annoy or baffle non-fans – parents in particular – is part of the appeal. The key thing to understand about YouTube stars is that the content of their videos – whether it’s Let’s Play game commentaries, makeup tutorials or personal vlogs – is only one half of their appeal. The connection to their audiences is the other: they have grown up with the tools to forge and strengthen that connection, and many will use that as their anchor to keep their feet on the ground.
- creator flight… (ex. Vine) platform precarity… (ex. Youtube creator academy) Germán Alejandro Garmendia Aranis (Spanish pronunciation: [xeɾˈman aleˈxandɾo ɣaɾˈmendja aˈɾanis];[a] born 25 April 1990), known by his YouTube channels HolaSoyGerman. and JuegaGerman, is a Chilean YouTuber, comedian and writer.
- how creator management operates throughout SME across three dimensions: platforms, intermediaries, and creators. Platforms manage creators, often through automated programmatic efforts, as reflected by YouTube’s partner program, Creator Academy, and Ad Sense features. But the platforms have ceded direct creator management to intermediaries, including multi-channel networks, talent representatives, publicists, and influencer agencies. And the creators themselves engage in self-management: the diverse practices of creative and production labour, content and platform management, media entrepreneurialism, and community management. Platforms: Alphabet/Google/YouTube’s state of ‘permanent beta’ conforms with the management strategies of tech culture but has also created ongoing precarity for creators attempting to build and manage sustainable media brands on the platform.
- https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/15/18182974/google-forced-arbitration-protest-facebook Last week we wrote about a pair of new lawsuits against Google’s parent company, Alphabet, alleging that the board acted improperly in which it agreed to pay out tens of millions of dollars to executives who had been found to have committed sexual misconduct. The plaintiffs are seeking a variety of internal reforms at Google, starting with an end to the forced arbitration agreements that limit employees’ legal rights when they are the subject of workplace discrimination. Tiku says the anti-arbitration campaign represents a watershed moment for tech’s budding labor movement, because it involves multiple companies. Googlers crowdsourced employment contracts from Facebook, Uber, and other companies, she reports, as well as contractors. They found that none of the companies surveyed made arbitration optional, allowed employees to bring class-action suits, or permitted them to discuss their cases. examples of platforms not being the super-efficient, monolithic entities they sometimes are made out to be. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/22/microsoft-protest-us-army-augmented-reality-headsets
- case study: new media work: challenging & reinforcing inequalities aspirational labor: work that you do in the hope that you someday will be paid for it… relational labour
- p379 Making Media quote chapter Duffy also: the Instagram-Husband… https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/instagram-husbands-are-no-longer-ashamed/580033/
- emotional labor and care work: when vloggers make mistakes (racism, insensitivity) Jeffree Star 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su6FeI7lHVg Star is often seen as the king of the beauty vlogging community. Recently, he was featured in a five-part docu-series by another YouTuber who profiled his rise to fame over the course of a decade. Star acknowledged his own controversial history, and racist comments from 10 years ago as well as his many ex-friends and rivals in the beauty community.
- Logan Paul 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIUuNvixwJU As for why the drama is blowing up now, Morillo says it has to do with the DIY nature of YouTube: “In YouTube in general, in this weird semi-celebrity status we have now, it’s so much easier to find sketchy things that people do because they don’t have people hired to make them have like this amazing image for their entire career.”
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1PABydQ668 22 January 2020 Ellen welcomed YouTube star Nikkie de Jager, a popular makeup artist and beauty blogger better known as NikkieTutorials. She recently gained attention with her video “I Am Coming Out,” in which she shared with her millions of fans that she is transgender. Nikkie chatted with Ellen about her experience, and Ellen and her friends at Shutterfly had a special gift for her to benefit The Trevor Project.
- In my 2017 book on the global games industry I detail the influence of what can be called a new ‘platform’ logic which brings together technological, industrial, creative and development shifts in the industry (Kerr 2017). Initially Facebook was the main player and social network games were able to work synergistically with the social networking services to promote their games. The emergence of smartphones and the development of digital online retailers with relatively short approval timeframes and standardised technologies opened up a new range of creative possibilities for amateurs and professionals. By 2017 even massively multiplayer online games were going free to play and across the platform logic development teams had to adapt their design approach to exploit in-game forms of monetisation.
- Games industry (overall strong market logic): console games: editorial logic (pitching, publishing deal, royalties) UNTIL 2011 “TOO BIG TO FAIL” mmog: flow logic (continuous content production, subscriptions) esports/livestreaming games: performance logic cloud-based games: club logic platform logic: mobile games (via Apple app store/Android Google Play), free to play convergence logic: modding, community management Full-time contracts are the norm for many in the industry who work for medium- to large-scale companies and the use of freelancers is relatively low – this in contrast to most other media industries. But: a high level of volatility for permanent employees. Precarity… Working for hire, working with transnational virtual teams, and unpaid work are relatively common.
- https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/the-making-of-rockstar-games-red-dead-redemption-2.html
- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-15-developers-drag-rockstar-over-100-hour-work-weeks
- https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
- https://kotaku.com/pissed-off-employees-bash-pretty-much-every-major-video-5940672
- Financial Incentives Health Free Products Social/Team Bonding events People, Process & Development Physical Workspace
- three persistent issues in the industry: a reliance on crunch time to deliver projects, a reliance on passion for games in recruitment, and a problem with staff retention. Q: HOW DOES PASSION SUSTAIN HIGHLY GENDERED STRUCTURES IN THE INDUSTRY? Passion has an elevated status in recruitment processes, but its deployment seems to be a very neoliberal call for (complete) emotional commitment to the company IGA Quality of Life survey game postmortems Developers are still young, male, white and most of them do not have children or elder care responsibilities. half of the respondents felt that there is not equal treatment and opportunity for all in the industry. diversity in the game industry, diversity in the workplace and diversity in game content were rated as important by 81-85% of respondents. spiral staircase model of career advancement (instead of VERTICAL) The spiral staircase approach allows employees to move around, not necessarily gaining any seniority, but instead learning different skills, or working in a new department or area. When there’s space above, the employee will have a far broader range of skills to bring to the role, and will have much greater experience of the business overall.
- https://plzdiversifyyourpanel.tumblr.com/
- Gamergate In short, in 2014 the hashtag gamergate started to circulate and become attached to an online and offline campaign of targeting, harassment, and threats aimed at female game designers, academics, and anyone who defended them. GamerGate refers to the online backlash against perceived breaches of journalistic integrity on video game news sites that occurred as a result of the Quinnspiracy, an online controversy surrounding indie game developer Zoe Quinn's alleged affairs with a number of men working in the video game industry, including Kotaku staff writer Nathan Grayson. The term has also since been used to describe the group of internet users, based mainly on Twitter, who claim that there is a lack of transparency within the video game journalism industry. These same people have also been criticized of practicing misogyny and sexism by many, through harassment and trolling, referring to their opposition as social justice warriors.
- https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/18/11265492/microsoft-xbox-sexist-gdc-party-apology 2016
- JOC 2016 The most sexualized character picked by the study is Ivy Valentine from Soul Caliber, released in 2014 by NAMCO. Results indicate that sexualization has diminished since an observed height in the 1990s. Traditionally male-oriented genres (e.g. fighting) have more sexualized characters than role-playing games. Games rated Teen or Mature did not differ in sexualization and featured more sexualization than Everyone games. Despite an increase in games featuring playable female characters, games still depict female charac- ters more often in secondary roles and sexualized them more than primary characters. A positive relationship emerged between the sexualization of female characters and their physical capability. Critical success of games was unrelated to sexualization.
- game localization issues
- https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/19/18226852/loot-boxes-gaming-regulation-gambling-free-to-play Some countries in the European Union have already begun to act. Last September, the Gambling Regulators European Forum (GREF) put out a statement that was signed by regulators from 15 different EU countries that were concerned about the practice. Last May, the Belgian Gaming Commission decided that loot boxes fell under the jurisdiction of its gambling law, and studios like Blizzard, Valve, and EA all pulled loot boxes from their games in those countries. As the concern spread across Europe, it started to catch fire in the US, but that momentum has stalled, and the video game industry’s lobbying efforts over this $30 billion industry seem to have curbed any tangible progress to regulate the sale of loot boxes.
- https://ncase.me/polygons/ SERIOUS GAMES