Dear Twitter…
Name my book.
Seriously.
The book has lived in my head for far too long as Developers in the Mist that I can’t really imagine it as anything different. I posed the question to the Extending Play community today and received some very helpful suggestions.
The book is an ethnography of the “AAA” videogame industry. It explores the everyday work of game development practice. The numerous technological, cultural and political-economic structures that surround it, support it and hold it back. It is about a pervasive structure of secrecy and the intense creative collaborative work that goes into building the complex systems that get labeled very simply as, “videogames.”
The text is structured in a way that tips it’s hat to the NES and Super Mario Bros. in important ways. Thus, there is a tendency towards thinking about pipes and pipelines.
It needs a name that is accessible, yet cuts to the quick. Lend me your wit:
- Manufacturing Fun: An Ethnography of the Modern Game Industry
- Manufacturing Fun: The Creative Collaborative Work of Videogame Development
- GAMEDEV.DOC: An Ethnography of the AAA Game Industry
- Coding in the Dark: Inside the Secret World of AAA Game Development (thanks: @jesperjuul)
- The Secret Code: An anthropology of AAA Game Development (thanks: @jesperjuul)
- Pipe Dreams & Pipelines: Secrecy in Game Development Culture (thanks: @ladybethel
- Feature Creep: ??? (thanks: @miguelsicart
- Pipe Dreams: ???
- Lost Levels: ???
- This is not a Pipe Dream: ???
Thank you.