This thesis investigates how the digital games industry conceptualises its audiences in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing upon research focused on other media industries, it argues in favour of a constructionist view of the audience that emphasises its discursive form and institutional uses. The term “player” is institutionally constructed in the same way, not referring to the actual people playing games, but to an imagined entity utilised to guide industrial decisions. Using both desk research and information gathered from expert interviews with digital game development professionals, this thesis looks at how ideas about players are formed and held by individual workers, transformed to become relevant for game production, and embedded into broader institutional conceptions that are shared and negotiated across a variety of institutional stakeholders. Adapting the term “audiencemaking” from mass communication research, this thesis identifies three key phases of the “playermaking” process in the digital games industry. First, information about players is gathered through both informal means and highly technologised audience measurement systems. Institutional stakeholders then translate this information into player, product and platform images that can be utilised during production. The remainder of the thesis looks at the more broad third phase in which these images are negotiated amongst a variety of institutional stakeholders as determined by power relations. These negotiations happen between individual workers who hold differing views of the player during development, companies and organisations struggling over position and value across the production chain, and the actual people playing games who strive to gain more influence over the creation of the images meant to represent their interests. These negotiations also reflect national policy contexts within a highly competitive global production network, visible in the comparison between the US neoliberal definition of both the industry and players as primarily market entities and the UK creative industries approach struggling to balance cultural concerns while safeguarding domestic production and inward investment. Ultimately, this thesis argues that conceptions of players are a central force structuring the shape and operation of a digital games industry in the midst of rapid technological, industrial, political and sociocultural change.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:591988 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Boyer, Steven Andrew |
| Publisher | University of Glasgow |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4925/ |
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