The unfortunate thing about my first semester teaching was that I felt as if I was never going to come up for air. The fortunate thing about that process is that it means I’ve been sitting on a pile of thoughts on a variety of videogame development and game industry issues that I’ve been following for quite a while now. Thus, the next several posts are ones which have remained, have persevered, as tabs in Firefox for nearly two months.
The first series of tabs are perhaps critically linked to the second post I’ll be making, but fundamentally about different issues. In my dissertation, especially in the “MOD(ify)-ing Game Development Worlds” sections I talked about some of the critical issues facing the videogame industry. I also talk specifically about how those practices which are hurting the videogame industry are actually many of the practices which are being imported into other “industries,” but most directly in other New Media industries. Those two particular chapters are titled:
- “Game Development Practice: A Postmortem”
- “The Game Industry Galaxy: A Postmortem”
Though I tease the Phil Harrison of 2007s Game Developers Conference and his “Game 3.0” slide from the Sony keynote, recent news reports have me wondering if he was really commited to the concept and his job at Atari has created an opportunity for him to pursue Game 3.0. The other possibility is that his experiences at Atari thus far have convinced him that Game 3.0 as the industry is currently structured will never be the lively world of Web 2.0 they wish it to be.