14.4: Conclusion

Deuze, Martin, and Allen stress the importance of mapping what they call “gamework”: “the key issues informing and influencing the working lives and professional identities” of developers in the global computer and video game industry.⁴⁰ Deuze and his colleagues were writing at a time when the dominant model involved developers working for large studios making games for publishing conglomerates like Electronic Arts. However, as we have seen in the case of the Australian industry, several options for making games and different workplace models confront developers. Some developers celebrate the creative freedom they experienced following the shift toward producing original IP games for mobile platforms, while others caution about the compromises associated with in-app monetization mechanics. The turmoil transforming the Australian games industry exemplifies precariousness. But it also includes adaptive experimentation in studio culture and associated changes in professional developer identity so as to continue the craft of making games in the midst of uncertainty. Analysts who have been very close to the industry and its developer culture, such as Casey O’Donnell, suggest that the current situation presents an opportunity to recapture the industry’s craft basis, the sustaining heart of the developer culture, stressing that gaming is not just a software industry.⁴¹ Creative destruction in the Australian games industry has been extraordinarily two-edged. As Gina Neff comments in the broader context of creative labor, “The trick for future media and business revolutions will be to find ways to support venture labor, so that innovative and creative jobs can also be stable and good jobs.”⁴²

To achieve this, programs designed to support the industry need stability and predictability. Turning the public support spigot on and off according to political whim and policy fashion escalates precariousness. Furthermore, the industry needs better management practices. In addition to providing a more welcoming workplace for women and managing the crunch, it needs to learn how and when to cooperate as well as compete, and how to identify and incorporate new skill sets to deal with “runaway” innovation. Advocacy needs to articulate the wider value of the industry to society and economy, and to emphasize viable career structures within it. Precariousness, we have suggested, is an addressable matter—one that governments, the industry as an associative entity, and those who still make games can work on together.