rethinking value and exchange through contemporary game cultures.
Transforming Creativity Research Group, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
This ongoing project was initiated by a symposium at WSA in 2015 (see below) and will see the publication in 2018 of a special issue of the journal Games and Culture.
Symposium at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, 30th June 2015
Play and games are at the heart of the new business models of mediatized global capitalism, attracting and sustaining attention, pioneering new techniques of payment and brand loyalty, lubricating the monetary and affective microtransactions of social media networks. The tensions are palpable: the social pleasures and spontaneous creativity of play harnessed to the late capitalist trajectories of ever greater mobilisation of everyday life for the aims of accumulation; the liminoid spaces of digital play gamified and punctuated by micropayments.
This one-day symposium will ask what other economies, currencies, modes of exchange and values are now – or could be – in play. From the hybrid entrepreneurial-cooperative spaces of game development hubs to new networked relationships between producers and players, from theoretical and practical tactics for diversifying computer game cultures to games design for actual world intervention, we will draw on recent critical and creative work on the games and media industries, work that questions what ‘economy’ might mean for more sustainable design and play futures.
This event will feature cutting edge research including the recent AHRC videogame network project on indie game development Creative Territories, crowd-funding for alternative games development, the role of non-profit games hubs, all female game jams, advergaming, e-sports, walkthrough entrepreneurship, theories of cultural value, the widening of participation in game development, and the gift economies of co-creation in online gameplay.
ludic economies 