TY - JOUR
T1 - Mitigating Exploitation
AU - Freeman, Guo
AU - Bardzell, Jeffrey
AU - Bardzell, Shaowen
AU - McNeese, Nathan
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank our participants and the anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under award #1849718.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/5/28
Y1 - 2020/5/28
N2 - Much HCI research seeks to contribute to technological agendas that lead to more just and participative labor relations and practices, yet that research also raises concerns about forms of exploitation associated with them. In this paper, we explore how U.S. independent [indie] game developers' socio-technological practices inject forms of labor, capital, and production into the game development industry. Our findings highlight that indie game development 1) seeks to promote an alternative to business models of game development that depend on free and immaterial labor; 2) builds offline networks at different scales to develop collectives that can sustain their production; and 3) emphasizes how distributed collaboration, co-creation, and the use of free tools and middleware make game production more widely accessible. The research contributes to HCI research that seeks to explicate and mitigate emerging forms of exploitation enabled by new technologies and processes. Our critical review of indie developers' practices and strategies also extends the current conceptualization of labor and technology in CSCW.
AB - Much HCI research seeks to contribute to technological agendas that lead to more just and participative labor relations and practices, yet that research also raises concerns about forms of exploitation associated with them. In this paper, we explore how U.S. independent [indie] game developers' socio-technological practices inject forms of labor, capital, and production into the game development industry. Our findings highlight that indie game development 1) seeks to promote an alternative to business models of game development that depend on free and immaterial labor; 2) builds offline networks at different scales to develop collectives that can sustain their production; and 3) emphasizes how distributed collaboration, co-creation, and the use of free tools and middleware make game production more widely accessible. The research contributes to HCI research that seeks to explicate and mitigate emerging forms of exploitation enabled by new technologies and processes. Our critical review of indie developers' practices and strategies also extends the current conceptualization of labor and technology in CSCW.
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U2 - 10.1145/3392864
DO - 10.1145/3392864
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85085653696
VL - 4
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
SN - 2573-0142
IS - CSCW1
M1 - 56
ER -