Global Games

In the last decade our mobile phones have been infiltrated by angry birds, our computers by leagues of legends and our social networks by pleas for help down on the farm. As digital games have become networked, mobile and casual they have become a pervasive cultural form. Based on original empirical work, including interviews with workers, virtual ethnographies in online games and analysis of industry related documents, Global Games provides a political, economic and sociological analysis of the growth and restructuring of the digital games industry over the past decade. Situating the games industry as both cultural and creative and examining the relative growth of console, PC, online and mobile, Aphra Kerr analyses the core production logics in the industry, and the expansion of circulation processes as game services have developed. In an industry dominated by North American and Japanese companies, Kerr explores the recent success of companies from China and Europe, and the emergent spatial politics as countries, cities, companies and communities compete to reshape digital games in the networked age.

Dr. Aphra Kerr is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University in Ireland. She is the author of The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamewor and Gameplay (2006) and she was associate editor of The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society (2015).

1. Introduction 2. Going Global - The Value, Structure and Geography of the Digital Games Industry 3. Production - Changing Production Logics, Organisations and Work/ers 4. Circulation - Monitoring, Measuring and Adapting to Transnational Markets 5. Going Local - Space, Place and Policy for Global Games Production 6. Conclusion