Business Administration, Management, and Operations | Open Access Articles

Building Momentum For Collectivity In The Digital Games Community, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Studies of digital game labor have tended to document problems in the working lives of developers while devoting relatively limited attention to solutions, or to collective representation as a step toward solutions. An increasing number of game developers are dissatisfied with their working conditions, and dissatisfaction is a necessary condition for workers to engage in collective action to gain the representational power needed to achieve change in the workplace. Noting that the landscape of collective mobilization in the game industry has not yet been systematically mapped, this article documents collective actions over the past five decades, and asks, “Are the …

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Women's Experiences On The Path To A Career In Game Development, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This chapter seeks to identify whether there is a dominant, presupposed career pipeline to a career in game development and then looks for women and women’s experiences at each stage of that pipeline. It concludes that a dominant pipeline does exist and that this pathway both disadvantages women who attempt it and marginalizes other pathways. Along the way women deal with obstacles that can delegitimize their choices and experiences and/or make the assumed pathway inhospitable. This chapter relies on published literature as well as data from the 2014 and 2015 Developer Satisfaction Surveys (DSS) conducted by the International Game Developers …

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Women & Video Games, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Presentations

This is a presentation that was given as part of the Industry Panel on Women`s Experiences in the Screen-Based Industries at the International CRIMT conference on Union Futures in Montreal, Quebec Oct 25-27, 2012

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A Polyphonic Approach To The 'Dark Side' Of Making Video Games, Johanna Weststar, Amanda Pettica-Harris, Steve Mckenna

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This paper considers the video game industry and how it is represented through social media blogs and tweets. It aims to disentangle the polyphony of voices communicating through different stories about what it means to work in the gaming industry. The multiple voices found within the blogs and tweets weave a complex and contested narrative about the carnivalesque way in which video games are made, poignantly illustrating the good, the bad, and the ugly. Using the work of the Russian literary theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 1993), and particularly his notions of monologic and dialogic stories and narratives (McKenna, …

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Full-Text Articles in Business Administration, Management, and Operations

Building Momentum For Collectivity In The Digital Games Community, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Women's Experiences On The Path To A Career In Game Development, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Women & Video Games, Johanna Weststar, Marie-Josee Legault

Management and Organizational Studies Presentations

A Polyphonic Approach To The 'Dark Side' Of Making Video Games, Johanna Weststar, Amanda Pettica-Harris, Steve Mckenna

Management and Organizational Studies Publications