From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices
从激进的形式化到高度的形式化：考虑更广泛的视频游戏开发实践

Introduction 介绍

In 2013, four young men in Melbourne, Australia who had been friends since high school decided to make a videogame together. Under the moniker House House, they began developing a four-player sports videogame called Push Me Pull You around their existing study and work commitments. While the group were aware of ‘indie’ videogame developers existing elsewhere in the world, they began creating their own game with no connections to the local scene that was then emerging in Melbourne in the wake of Australia’s collapsed videogame industry (Banks and Cunningham Citation2016). This changed gradually as the images and videos they posted to social media platforms gradually gained attention from other Melbourne-based developers. In 2014, another emerging Melbourne videogame developer, Lee Shang Lun, won a scholarship through the International Game Developers Association to attend the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. GDC is the capital event of the global (but predominately Western) videogame industry, with over 20,000 attendees each year. Lee took a laptop to the conference with various Melbourne-made games installed—including Push Me Pull You—to give exposure to other creators from his local scene who could not afford to attend the expensive industry event priced to target large development studios. At the same GDC, Push Me Pull You was displayed at a party jointly held by American indie collective Venus Patrol and British videogame exhibiters Wild Rumpus. By the end of GDC 2014, journalists for Ars Technica, Eurogamer, and Kotaku had all played and reported on the game (Orland and Machkovech Citation2014; Matulef Citation2014; Serrels Citation2014).
2013 年，澳大利亚墨尔本的四名从高中起就是朋友的年轻人决定一起制作一款电子游戏。他们以 House House 为名，围绕现有的学习和工作承诺，开始开发一款名为Push Me Pull You的四人体育视频游戏。虽然该组织意识到世界其他地方存在“独立”视频游戏开发商，但他们开始创建自己的游戏，与当地场景没有任何联系，该游戏当时在澳大利亚视频游戏行业崩溃后在墨尔本兴起（Banks and Cunningham 2016） 。随着他们发布到社交媒体平台上的图像和视频逐渐受到其他墨尔本开发商的关注，这种情况逐渐发生了变化。 2014年，另一位墨尔本新兴视频游戏开发者李尚伦通过国际游戏开发者协会获得奖学金，参加旧金山的游戏开发者大会（GDC）。 GDC 是全球（但主要是西方）视频游戏行业的资本盛会，每年有超过 20,000 名与会者。 Lee 带着一台安装了各种墨尔本制作的游戏（包括Push Me Pull You）的笔记本电脑参加会议，以便让当地的其他创作者有机会接触到这些创作者，这些创作者无法负担参加针对大型开发工作室的昂贵行业活动的费用。在同一个 GDC 上， 《Push Me Pull You》在美国独立团体 Venus Patrol 和英国电子游戏参展商 Wild Rumpus 联合举办的派对上进行了展示。到 GDC 2014 结束时， Ars Technica 、 Eurogamer和Kotaku的记者都玩过并报道了这款游戏（Orland 和 Machkovech 2014；Matulef 2014；Serrels 2014）。

With this increased international recognition, House House successfully applied for funding through the state government body Film Victoria to support continued development of the game. Through Renew Australia’s Dockland Spaces project, which worked to revitalise an under-utilised region of Melbourne’s central business district, the team received temporary office space from which to work on the game in a more formal setting. Dan Golding—a Melbourne-based media studies academic, Freeplay Independent Games Festival director, and friend of House House—was commissioned to produce the game’s music. In mid-2016, Push Me Pull You was released digitally on the Steam platform for PC and Mac and—with development support from Melbourne studio League of Geeks and extra funding from Sony—was ported to Sony’s PlayStation 4 console, becoming one of only a handful of Australian videogames to appear on a home console that year. House House tell me they did not individually profit from Push Me Pull You, but they didn’t lose money either. The game paid for its own development while the team were each supported by other forms of income, but its critical success has allowed the four friends to find publisher funding for a second, larger project on which they all work full-time.
随着国际认可度的提高，House House 成功通过州政府机构 Film Victoria 申请资金，以支持该游戏的持续开发。通过 Renew Australia 的 Dockland Spaces 项目，该项目致力于振兴墨尔本中央商务区未充分利用的区域，团队获得了临时办公空间，可以在更正式的环境中开发游戏。丹·戈尔丁 (Dan Golding) 是一位墨尔本媒体研究学者、Freeplay 独立游戏节总监，也是 House House 的朋友，他受委托制作该游戏的音乐。 2016 年中， 《Push Me Pull You》在 PC 和 Mac 的 Steam 平台上以数字方式发布，并在墨尔本工作室 League of Geeks 的开发支持和索尼的额外资助下，被移植到索尼的 PlayStation 4 游戏机上，成为仅有的一款那一年，少数澳大利亚电子游戏出现在家用游戏机上。 House House 告诉我，他们并没有从Push Me Pull You中单独获利，但他们也没有亏损。该游戏为自己的开发提供了资金，而团队每个人都得到其他形式的收入支持，但它的巨大成功让四位朋友为第二个更大的项目找到了发行商资金，他们都全职工作。

I start this article with the story of Push Me Pull You’s development process and House House’s maturation as a development team to draw attention to how contemporary videogame development is defined by a complex network of actors and practices that is not captured by the straightforward developer-publisher-retailer model through which videogame development and distribution have been traditionally understood. Social media networks, local communities, formal studio spaces, scholarships, hobbies, government funding, urban renewal projects, friendships, part-time jobs, parties, and international publishers and corporate events all played a role in the development and distribution of this ostensibly ‘independent’ videogame that, at the end of the day, made little money but was critically well-received. The particularities are unique but the story of Push Me Pull You is not exceptional. This form of collaborative, networked videogame development that meshes hobbyist creative activity with the commercial ambitions and regulatory processes of the commercial industry is increasingly prevalent globally. House House demonstrate how the nature of videogame development and distribution is eroding a once distinct line between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ videogame developers.
我以Push Me Pull You的开发过程和 House House 作为开发团队的成熟故事开始这篇文章，以引起人们的注意，当代视频游戏开发是如何由复杂的参与者和实践网络定义的，而这些是直接的开发人员无法捕捉到的- 发行商-零售商模型，传统上通过该模型来理解视频游戏的开发和发行。社交媒体网络、当地社区、正式的工作室空间、奖学金、爱好、政府资助、城市更新项目、友谊、兼职工作、聚会、国际出版商和企业活动都在这种表面上的发展和发行中发挥了作用。独立的视频游戏最终赚了很少的钱，但广受好评。虽然其特殊性是独一无二的，但《Push Me Pull You》的故事并不例外。这种将业余爱好者的创意活动与商业抱负和商业行业监管流程相结合的协作式网络视频游戏开发形式在全球日益盛行。 House House 展示了视频游戏开发和发行的本质如何侵蚀“业余”和“专业”视频游戏开发者之间曾经截然不同的界限。

In a recent doctoral thesis, Christopher Young identifies the emergence of “everyday gamemakers” as a broader spectrum of professional and amateur creators that are “establishing their own cultural norms and practices [to transform] the professional infrastructures of the video game industry” (2018, 6). Along with others (Kerr Citation2017; O’Donnell Citation2014; Parker and Jenson Citation2017), Young demonstrates how the rise of digital storefronts such as Apple’s App Store and Valve’s Steam alongside more accessible development tools such as Unity and GameMaker have coincided with a greatly diversified range of global and local contexts in which videogames are created, distributed, financed, purchased, and played. This rise of everyday gamemakers poses a challenge for the growing body of literature that strives to understand videogames as a creative industry—one estimated to be reaching a value of US$100billion globally. There is an increased awareness that the videogame industry does not function in any one straightforward way but requires the same nuanced considerations of political economy, creative labour, and the global flow of both market and non-market forces as every other mature creative industry (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford Citation2005; O’Donnell Citation2014; Kerr Citation2017; Consalvo Citation2016; Keogh Citation2015). But how does the researcher of the videogame industry account for a group like House House? At what stage of the above story does House House transition from being just another group of amateur enthusiasts into a professional development studio that is formally participating in the videogame industry?
在最近的一篇博士论文中，克里斯托弗·杨（Christopher Young）将“日常游戏制作者”的出现视为更广泛的专业和业余创作者，他们“建立自己的文化规范和实践[以改变]视频游戏行业的专业基础设施”（2018 ，6）。 Young 与其他人（Kerr 2017；O'Donnell 2014；Parker 和 Jenson 2017）一起展示了 Apple 的 App Store 和 Valve 的 Steam 等数字店面以及 Unity 和 GameMaker 等更易于访问的开发工具的兴起如何与高度多元化的发展同时发生。视频游戏的创建、分发、融资、购买和玩的全球和本地环境。日常游戏制作者的崛起对不断增长的文献提出了挑战，这些文献致力于将视频游戏理解为创意产业——全球价值估计将达到 1000 亿美元。人们越来越认识到，视频游戏产业并不是以任何一种直接的方式运作，而是需要像其他成熟的创意产业一样，对政治经济、创意劳动力以及市场和非市场力量的全球流动进行细致入微的考虑。 Peuter 和 Dyer-Witheford 2005；O'Donnell 2014；Kerr 2016；Keogh 2015）。但视频游戏行业的研究人员如何解释像 House House 这样的群体呢？在上述故事的哪个阶段，House House 从另一群业余爱好者转变为正式参与视频游戏行业的专业开发工作室？

In this article I do not want to answer these questions so much as argue that they are the wrong questions to ask. Instead, by historically contextualising the current emergence of everyday gamemakers, I propose that broader networks of non-commercial activity need to be accounted for as already a vital aspect of the videogame industry. By tracing a history of how the global videogame industry formalised through specific economic and social interests, this article denaturalises assumptions about how videogame development practices function. I forward the notion of informal videogame development practices as a broad catch-all for this fringe-yet-foundational wider range of creative practices that happen around and as the base of the commercial videogame industry. I propose that a period of aggressive formalisation through the 1980s to the 2000s normalised a particular, commercial understanding of videogame development, which is now becoming unstable through a transition into the current period of intensified intermingling of formal and informal actors—or what this article calls a period of intense in/formalisation. Traditional, hegemonic, and hierarchical configurations of the videogame industry—with console manufacturers and multinational publishers on top as both gatekeepers and profiteers, and exploited gamemakers at the bottom struggling with a number of well-cited labour issues such as crunch and stifling non-disclosure agreements (O’Donnell Citation2014; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter Citation2009)—are being challenged by an emerging, decentralised nebula of localised studios and individuals creating and distributing videogame works in a much vaster range of socio-economic contexts (Kerr Citation2017). The practice of these creators is not exceptional, but the new rule of the conditions in which videogames are primarily made: mundanely, precariously, and across intensifying networks of professional and amateur labour, and they provide us an opportunity to reconsider how the videogame industry came to be understood as monolithic in the first place.
在这篇文章中，我不想回答这些问题，而是想指出这些问题是错误的。相反，通过历史背景地分析当前日常游戏制作者的出现，我建议需要将更广泛的非商业活动网络视为视频游戏行业的一个重要方面。通过追溯全球视频游戏产业如何通过特定的经济和社会利益而形式化的历史，本文否定了关于视频游戏开发实践如何运作的假设。我提出非正式视频游戏开发实践的概念，作为对围绕商业视频游戏行业并作为商业视频游戏行业基础的边缘但基础的更广泛的创意实践的广泛概括。我认为，从 20 世纪 80 年代到 2000 年代，一段积极的正规化时期使对视频游戏开发的一种特定的商业理解正常化，而这种理解现在由于过渡到当前正式和非正式参与者强化混合的时期而变得不稳定——或者本文所说的那样一段激烈的/正式化的时期。视频游戏行业的传统、霸权和等级结构——游戏机制造商和跨国发行商处于顶层，既是看门人又是暴利者，而底层的游戏制造商则在许多广为人知的劳工问题上苦苦挣扎，例如紧缩和令人窒息的保密问题协议（O'Donnell 2014；Dyer-Witheford 和 de Peuter 2009）——正受到新兴的、分散的本地化工作室和个人创作星云的挑战并在更广泛的社会经济背景下分发视频游戏作品（Kerr 2017）。 这些创作者的做法并不例外，但电子游戏主要制作条件的新规则：平凡、不稳定、跨越专业和业余劳动力的强化网络，它们为我们提供了一个重新考虑电子游戏行业如何诞生的机会首先要被理解为整体。

The first section draws from Lobato and Thomas’s work on informal media economies to consider the role of informality for the creative industries. What is immediately clear is the impossibility of simply categorising individual creators as either ‘professional’ or ‘amateur’ creators; instead, every creative industry is formed through a constant tension between formalising and informalising practices as technological, legal, and social contexts shift. The second section then turns to the history of the videogame industry specifically and the strategies of console manufacturers—pioneered by Nintendo—that worked to aggressively formalise the videogame industry since the mid-1980s. In this period, informal development practices were actively suppressed by the formal game industry, and this in turn normalised a particular popular perception of the videogame medium that was limited to those videogames produced by the formal industry. More recently, technological and cultural shifts are challenging this hegemony and allowing informal videogame development practices to reach a renewed visibility through mobile, indie, amateur, and artistic videogame creation. This new context points towards an intensified relationship between the formal industry and informal creators where each is increasingly dependent on the other. This comes with new challenges, however, as the newly empowered informal creators confront consumer cultures cultivated for decades to appreciate only the narrow range of videogame experiences produced by the formal industry, leading to dramatic and sometimes violent reactions as was the case in 2014’s Gamergate event. The final section of this article briefly uses these tensions to outline a cultural bottleneck between how videogames are predominately perceived as commercial products and the much wider range of practices and actors that actually constitute the creative field of videogames. Videogames are a diverse and mature creative industry that is undergoing a period of seismic restructure. It is hoped this article, with its historical contextualising of contemporary informal development practices, will help creative industries researchers navigate this changing, complex terrain and to better answer the question: who else makes videogames?
第一部分借鉴了洛巴托和托马斯关于非正式媒体经济的研究，以考虑非正式性对创意产业的作用。显而易见的是，不可能简单地将个人创作者分为“专业”或“业余”创作者。相反，随着技术、法律和社会环境的变化，每一个创意产业都是通过正规化和非正规化实践之间的持续紧张关系形成的。第二部分具体介绍了电子游戏行业的历史，以及由任天堂开创的游戏机制造商的策略，这些制造商自 20 世纪 80 年代中期以来一直致力于积极规范电子游戏行业。在此期间，非正式的开发实践受到正规游戏行业的积极压制，这反过来又使对视频游戏媒体的一种特定流行看法正常化，这种看法仅限于正规行业生产的视频游戏。最近，技术和文化的转变正在挑战这种霸权，并允许非正式的视频游戏开发实践通过移动、独立、业余和艺术视频游戏创作获得新的知名度。这种新的背景表明，正规行业和非正规创造者之间的关系更加紧密，彼此之间的依赖程度越来越高。然而，这也带来了新的挑战，因为新获得权力的非正式创作者面临着几十年来培养的消费文化，只欣赏正规行业生产的狭隘视频游戏体验，导致戏剧性的、有时甚至是暴力的反应，就像 2014 年的 Gamergate 事件一样。 本文的最后一部分简要地利用这些紧张关系来概述电子游戏如何被主要视为商业产品与实际上构成电子游戏创意领域的更广泛的实践和参与者之间的文化瓶颈。视频游戏是一个多元化且成熟的创意产业，正在经历一个巨大的重组时期。希望这篇文章结合当代非正式发展实践的历史背景，能够帮助创意产业研究人员驾驭这个不断变化、复杂的领域，并更好地回答这个问题：还有谁在制作视频游戏？

Informal creative economies
非正式创意经济

The professional creators and corporate distributors of the media industries are fundamentally influenced and shaped by a broader web of creative and economic activity. The notions of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economies provide one lens through which to consider this activity. ‘Informal’ economies as a concept refers broadly to “a range of activities and processes occurring outside the official, authorized space of the economy” (Lobato and Thomas Citation2015, 7): roadside stalls, cash-in-hand work, privately selling second-hand books. As a “common sense notion whose moving social boundaries cannot be captured by a strict definition without closing the debate prematurely” (Castells and Portes Citation1989, 11), the idea of informal economies was initially used by European economists to comprehend the economic structures of developing nations, but in more recent decades has found itself used to track economic activity in the increasingly deregulated and liberalised Western economies where an increased amount of ‘flexible’ or ‘precarious’ economic activity—itself solidifying into what is becoming known as the ‘gig economy’—evades more formalised lenses (Lobato and Thomas Citation2015, 10). In regards to the creative media industries such as film, television, music, and videogames, informal economies bring to mind, on the one hand, images of copyright infringement and piracy (peer-to-peer distribution of MP3 files ripped from a music CD; burnt DVDs sold outside a train station; the unauthorised modification and redistribution of licensed software) and, on the other, the mythical origin stories of tech industry entrepreneurs (Steve Jobs starting Apple in his parents’ garage; Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook in a college dorm). In both senses, informality is neither simply outlier nor illegal activity but a foundational aspect of how creative media industries form, function, mutate, and innovate.
媒体行业的专业创作者和企业分销商从根本上受到更广泛的创意和经济活动网络的影响和塑造。 “正规”和“非正规”经济的概念提供了一个审视这一活动的视角。 “非正规”经济作为一个概念，广义上指“在官方、授权的经济空间之外发生的一系列活动和过程”（Lobato 和 Thomas 2015，7）：路边摊、现金工作、私下出售二手商品- 手书。作为一个“常识性概念，如果不过早结束争论，就无法通过严格的定义来捕捉其不断变化的社会边界”（Castells and Portes 1989, 11），非正规经济的概念最初被欧洲经济学家用来理解发展中国家的经济结构。但近几十年来，它发现自己习惯于追踪日益放松管制和自由化的西方经济体的经济活动，在这些经济体中，“灵活”或“不稳定”的经济活动数量不断增加，而这些经济活动本身就固化为正被称为“零工经济”——回避了更正式的镜头（Lobato 和 Thomas 2015，10）。就电影、电视、音乐和视频游戏等创意媒体产业而言，非正规经济一方面让人想起侵犯版权和盗版的形象（点对点分发从音乐 CD 上抓取的 MP3 文件）另一方面，科技行业企业家的神话起源故事（史蒂夫·乔布斯在他父母的车库里创办了苹果公司；马克·扎克伯格在 1999 年创建了 Facebook）。大学宿舍）。 从这两个意义上讲，非正式性既不是简单的异常行为，也不是非法活动，而是创意媒体产业如何形成、运作、变异和创新的一个基本方面。

The informal is not a discrete zone of economic practice detached from the regulated practices of formal media and software organisations; nor does it simply come ‘before’ the formalisation of an industry. Rather, the activities of different individuals and organisations, the affordances of different technologies and policies, and cultivated tastes of different cultural moments continuously formalise and informalise media economies. Lobato and Thomas highlight this with the example of the music industry that, at the turn of the 21st Century, was dramatically reshaped by the rise of software that made it easy to rip CDs into digital MP3 files that could then be shared directly between networked computers. Online services like Napster and Limewire dramatically informalised the music industry—allowing access to the distribution of music products beyond the formal channels of record stores—before companies like Apple in turn re-formalised these informalising practices, regulating the management, distribution, and use of MP3 files through iTunes and the iPod once the concept of keeping a digital library of song files, as opposed to a collection of CDs, had become normalised. The music industry did not simply suppress these informal practices but formalised them, subsuming them into its regulated economic practice to reinsert itself into the flow of capital. Crucially, this re-formalising practice changed what the music industry fundamentally is. The story of media economies is a möbius strip of informal practices circumventing or emerging beyond the regulations of the formal economy, and the formal media economies adapting to and incorporating informal practices in turn.
非正式经济实践并不是脱离正规媒体和软件组织的受监管实践的离散领域；它也不仅仅发生在一个行业正规化“之前”。相反，不同个人和组织的活动、不同技术和政策的可供性以及不同文化时刻培养的品味不断使媒体经济正式化和非正式化。 Lobato 和 Thomas 以音乐行业为例强调了这一点，在 21 世纪初，软件的兴起极大地重塑了音乐行业，这些软件可以轻松地将 CD 翻录成数字 MP3 文件，然后可以直接在联网计算机之间共享。 Napster 和 Limewire 等在线服务极大地使音乐行业变得非正规化——允许在唱片店的正式渠道之外发行音乐产品——然后像苹果这样的公司反过来将这些非正规化的做法重新正规化，规范音乐产品的管理、发行和使用。通过 iTunes 和 iPod 传输 MP3 文件，保存歌曲文件数字库（而不是 CD 集合）的概念已经成为常态。音乐产业并没有简单地压制这些非正式做法，而是将它们正规化，将它们纳入受监管的经济实践中，以重新融入资本流动。至关重要的是，这种重新形式化的做法从根本上改变了音乐产业。媒体经济的故事是一条莫比乌斯带，非正式实践规避或超越正规经济的监管，而正规媒体经济又反过来适应和纳入非正式实践。

The intermingling of informal and formal media economies has become particularly intensified in the wake of Web 2.0 and the rise of participatory social media platforms specifically. Individual content creators are increasingly afforded by and rely on formal corporate platforms to distribute their creative activity to dispersed niche audiences while, at the same time, these formal platforms are commercially dependent on the content produced by informal creators: a blogger with a Patreon tip jar; an aspiring musician selling songs on Bandcamp; an amateur influencer reviewing products on Youtube or Instagram (Burgess Citation2016; Abidin Citation2018). This intensification has broadly been considered from two different perspectives. Positively, the rise of formal digital platforms that afford informal labour have been celebrated as providing more empowering opportunities for a wider range of individuals to distribute and commercialise their creative work outside of traditional, corporate frameworks (Jenkins Citation2006; Florida Citation2003). Where broadcast media such as radio and television had to cast the widest net possible and thus encouraged content for a very broad, inevitably hegemonic demographic, the informal labour afforded by digital media allows more niche creators to develop specialised content and distribute it directly to niche audiences. More cynically, the rise of such platforms has been critiqued for producing and exploiting creators by individualising and informalising creative worker conditions so as to displace employer obligations and disempower collective bargaining possibilities. Youtube, for instance, allows a marginal creator to reach an international audience, but while taking some of the profits and none of the risk associated with such creative labour, and with no obligation to provide creators with a salary, sick leave, or insurance. Beyond the creative sector, debates around the politics of ostensibly neutral digital ‘platforms’ (Gillespie Citation2010) are particularly critical at present in the emerging ‘gig economy’ discourse around companies like Uber and AirBnB that are entirely dependent on the labour of individualised ‘users’—not employees—who are not entitled to the same benefits such as overtime, holiday leave, and sick leave (Scholz Citation2016). Creative labour is thus intensely in/formalised in the current digital and platformised age. Informal creators are formalised through their use and reliance of formal corporate platforms while, at the same time, formal corporate platforms depend on and support a much wider spectrum of informal creative labour.
随着 Web 2.0 和参与性社交媒体平台的兴起，非正式和正式媒体经济的混合变得尤其加剧。个人内容创作者越来越多地依赖正式的企业平台将其创意活动分发给分散的利基受众，同时，这些正式平台在商业上依赖于非正式创作者制作的内容：拥有 Patreon 小费罐的博主;一位有抱负的音乐家，在 Bandcamp 上销售歌曲；在 Youtube 或 Instagram 上评论产品的业余影响者（Burgess 2016；Abidin 2018）。人们从两个不同的角度广泛考虑这种强化。积极的一面是，提供非正规劳动力的正规数字平台的兴起为更广泛的个人提供了更多的赋权机会，让他们能够在传统的企业框架之外分发和商业化他们的创意作品（Jenkins 2006；Florida 2003）。广播和电视等广播媒体必须尽可能广泛地撒网，从而鼓励向非常广泛、不可避免的霸权人群提供内容，而数字媒体提供的非正式劳动力则允许更多利基创作者开发专门的内容并将其直接分发给利基受众。更讽刺的是，此类平台的兴起被批评为通过个性化和非正式化创意工作者的条件来生产和剥削创作者，从而取代雇主义务并剥夺集体谈判的可能性。 例如，YouTube 允许边缘创作者接触国际观众，但同时承担部分利润，并且不承担与此类创造性劳动相关的风险，并且没有义务为创作者提供工资、病假或保险。除了创意领域之外，围绕表面上中立的数字“平台”政治的争论（Gillespie 2010）目前在围绕 Uber 和 AirBnB 等公司的新兴“零工经济”讨论中尤为重要，这些公司完全依赖于个性化“用户的劳动” ”——而不是员工——他们无权享受加班、假期和病假等相同福利（Scholz 2016）。因此，在当前的数字化和平台化时代，创造性劳动已高度内化/正式化。非正式创作者通过使用和依赖正式企业平台而被正式化，同时，正式企业平台依赖并支持更广泛的非正式创造性劳动。

How does one adequately account for the spectrum of creative activity in this intensified in/formal context of digital platforms? By definition (or lack thereof), the informal evades strict measurement. One cannot simply account for every blogger or Youtube user in the same way one might be able to map the major recording labels or book publishers. Likewise, one cannot simply account for every potential House House that may or may not professionalise into a commercial videogame studio. But neither is it adequate to only account for definitively formal actors, as this ignores a massive sector of innovation and change. It accounts for the chicken, without accounting for the egg, and thus misses the vital reflexivity that underlines the creative industries. For Lobato and Thomas, the strength of the notion of informality is broadly in its “invitation for researchers to view ostensibly stable objects of knowledge from the perspective of this uncertainty” (2015, 12). Rather than a simple methodology, informality provides an alternative perspective from which to consider creative industries as inherently unstable and uncertain. It demands a synthesis of top-down political economy and institutional analysis alongside the bottom-up orientation of cultural studies (Lobato and Thomas Citation2015, 13). Just as researchers looking at other creative industries, such as popular music, have drawn attention to the persisting significance of local (and inter-local) scenes and communities even as the internet seemingly globalises distribution (O’Connor Citation2004; Kruse Citation2010), to account for the intermingling of formal and informal creative practices is to hold onto both local and global lenses of inquiry, to account for the local and inter-local conduits of commerce, creativity, precarity, and power that underline—that are—creative industries.
在数字平台这种强化的非正式/正式背景下，如何充分解释创意活动的范围？根据定义（或缺乏定义），非正式逃避了严格的衡量。人们不能像绘制主要唱片公司或图书出版商那样简单地统计每一位博主或 Youtube 用户。同样，我们不能简单地考虑每一个可能会或可能不会专业化为商业视频游戏工作室的潜在 House House。但仅考虑明确的正式参与者也是不够的，因为这忽略了大量的创新和变革。它只考虑了先有鸡，而没有考虑到先有蛋，因此错过了强调创意产业的重要自反性。对于洛巴托和托马斯来说，非正式性概念的力量主要在于它“邀请研究人员从这种不确定性的角度来看待表面上稳定的知识对象”（2015，12）。非正规性不是一种简单的方法，而是提供了另一种视角，从这个角度来考虑创意产业本质上的不稳定和不确定性。它需要将自上而下的政治经济学和制度分析与自下而上的文化研究相结合（Lobato and Thomas 2015, 13）。 正如研究流行音乐等其他创意产业的研究人员已经注意到本地（和本地间）场景和社区的持续重要性，即使互联网似乎全球化了传播（O'Connor 2004；Kruse 2010），考虑到正式和非正式创意实践的混合，就要抓住本地和全球的探究视角，考虑到本地和本地间的商业、创造力、不稳定和强调创意产业的权力渠道。

One way to account for informality in the creative industries is to begin with the daily practices of creators that straddle the in/formal divide, those that do not squarely sit on one side or the other, such as House House. Lobato and Thomas note that those practitioners that move across this divide are those that are regularly referred to as ‘entrepreneurs’: either productively through formalising new markets for new products (Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg) or non-productively through informalising existing formal markets (Kim Dot Com of Megaupload, Sean Parker of Napster) (2015, 47). The notion of entrepreneurship is not without problematic connotations. The entrepreneur is regularly glorified as the exemplary ‘by their own bootstraps’ young male innovator loved by neoliberalism, with vast networks of labour and innovation rendered opaque by their mythologised origin stories. Lobato and Thomas here provide a useful nuancing of the concept through the contrast of opportunity entrepreneurship with necessity entrepreneurship:
解释创意产业中非正式性的一种方法是从跨越非正式/正式鸿沟的创作者的日常实践开始，这些创作者并不完全站在一边或另一边，例如 House House。洛巴托和托马斯指出，那些跨越这一鸿沟的从业者是那些经常被称为“企业家”的人：要么通过新产品的新市场正规化而富有成效（史蒂夫·乔布斯、马克·扎克伯格），要么通过现有正规市场的非正式化而没有成效（ Megaupload 的 Kim Dot Com、Napster 的 Sean Parker）（2015 年，47）。创业精神的概念并非没有问题。企业家经常被誉为新自由主义所喜爱的“靠自己的努力”年轻男性创新者的典范，他们神话般的起源故事使庞大的劳动力和创新网络变得不透明。洛巴托和托马斯通过机会创业与必然创业的对比，对这一概念提供了有用的细微差别：

In the digital media industries generally and in the videogame industry specifically, informal practices have until recently primarily received attention through the mythos of the opportunity entrepreneurship of the tech start-up. The more recent intensification of in/formal labour practices visible on platforms such as Youtube, Bandcamp, and Steam, however, can be better considered as necessity entrepreneurship, where informal creators gain access to particular niche audiences not feasible at larger scales through strictly informal processes, while also remaining largely dependent on formal corporate platforms that depend on informal creators in turn. Crucially, the necessity entrepreneur rarely jumps fully into the formal field as the successful opportunity entrepreneur does but instead persists in a position of precarity and dependence on formal platforms, constantly at risk of policy changes, platform closures, abusive or fickle audiences, or broader issues of precarity such as a lack of paid sick leave. For instance, a number of sex workers using the patronage service Patreon to fund and circulate amateur and independent adult content suddenly found themselves cutoff from their audiences after Patreon changed the wording of their content policy (Cole Citation2017). The still-marginal necessity entrepreneur, empowered but not entirely formalised by digital platforms, captures the contradictions and liminality of in/formal digital creative labour between flexibility and precarity, empowered and exploited.
在数字媒体行业，特别是在视频游戏行业，直到最近，非正式实践主要通过科技初创企业的机会创业神话而受到关注。然而，最近在 Youtube、Bandcamp 和 Steam 等平台上可见的非正式/正式劳动实践的强化，可以更好地被视为必要的创业精神，非正式的创作者可以通过严格的非正式流程接触到在更大范围内不可行的特定利基受众。 ，同时在很大程度上仍然依赖于正式的企业平台，而这些平台又依赖于非正式的创作者。至关重要的是，必需品企业家很少像成功的机会企业家那样完全进入正规领域，而是始终处于不稳定和依赖正规平台的境地，不断面临政策变化、平台关闭、受众滥用或善变或更广泛问题的风险缺乏带薪病假等不稳定因素。例如，一些性工作者利用赞助服务 Patreon 来资助和传播业余和独立成人内容，但在 Patreon 改变了内容政策的措辞后，他们突然发现自己与观众隔绝了（Cole 2017）。仍然处于边缘地位的必需品企业家，虽然被数字平台赋予了权力，但并未完全正规化，但他们抓住了非正式/正式数字创意劳动在灵活性和不稳定、赋权和剥削之间的矛盾和局限性。

What the informal ultimately suggests is that tracing the dominant production and distribution logics of commodified creative works do not tell the whole story of how creative industries are constituted. Aphra Kerr notes that in tracing the shape of a creative industry it is vital to account for not just the structuring force of the market but also for “productions that are motivated by social, cultural, symbolic or political values” (2017, 70). Accounting for the complex intermingling of informal and formal practices—considering ostensibly stable and known media monoliths from the perspective of instability and flux—provides one fruitful lens through which to do this. This means, in part, to reconsider how particular creative industries, such as the videogame industry, were able to ever be conceptualised as stable or primarily market-driven in the first place. Which foundational actors and practices remained unaccounted for in such a conceptualisation?
非正式的最终建议是，追踪商品化创意作品的主导生产和分配逻辑并不能说明创意产业是如何构成的全部故事。阿芙拉·克尔 (Aphra Kerr) 指出，在追踪创意产业的形态时，不仅要考虑市场的结构力量，还要考虑“受社会、文化、象征或政治价值观驱动的产品”（2017，70）。考虑到非正式和正式实践的复杂混合——从不稳定和变化的角度考虑表面上稳定和已知的媒体巨石——提供了一个富有成效的镜头来做到这一点。这在一定程度上意味着要重新考虑特定的创意产业，例如视频游戏产业，如何能够被概念化为稳定的或主要由市场驱动的产业。在这样的概念化过程中，哪些基本参与者和实践仍未得到解释？

This article will now turn to the videogame industry which has, since the late 1980s at least, been considered as particularly stable, monolithic, and market-centric. The next section will firstly demonstrate the aggressive formalisation of the industry that worked to exclude informal creators through the 1980s to the 2000s and which constructed the lingering hegemonic conceptualisation of the videogame industry before the article then turns to the intense in/formalisation of recent years that, as in other digital fields, has rendered visible the informal creators and practices that the formal industry is continuously reshaped by and through which informal creators are themselves reshaped.
本文现在将转向视频游戏行业，至少自 20 世纪 80 年代末以来，该行业一直被认为特别稳定、单一且以市场为中心。下一节将首先展示该行业积极的正规化，该行业在 20 世纪 80 年代至 2000 年代致力于排除非正式创作者，并构建了视频游戏行业挥之不去的霸权概念，然后文章转向近年来的强烈的正规化：与其他数字领域一样，非正式创造者和实践变得可见，正规行业不断被重塑，非正式创造者本身也通过这些实践被重塑。

1980 s-2000s: the videogame industry as aggressively formalised
1980 年代至 2000 年代：视频游戏行业积极正规化

Videogames existed before the videogame industry. As a creative form, the videogame emerged across a number of early computing experiments such as William Higinbotham’s Tennis For Two produced for the Donner Model 30 analog computer in 1958 and the Tech Model Railroad Club’s Spacewar produced for MIT’s PDP-1 in 1962, and fit into existing cultural forms such as the penny arcade (Huhtamo Citation2005), immersive cinema experiments (Golding Citation2014), and art movements exploring alternative engagements with televisual media (Wilson Citation2007). It was through the late 1960s and 1970s that the early videogame industry developed out of the commercialisation of a range of informal practices, especially centralised in North America and the UK, with the emergence of a range of technologies such as the coin-operated arcade machine, and the home television game console—such as the Magnavox Odyssey and later the Atari Video Computer System (VCS). Before the young industry stabilised into any one dominant production logic, videogames continued to be created and distributed in a range of formal and informal capacities. With the growing availability of the microcomputer, users were able (and often required) to write their own programs, leading to the formation of hobbyist groups that would create, share, duplicate, remix, and reshare a number of ‘homebrew’ games (Swalwell Citation2012).
电子游戏在电子游戏行业出现之前就已经存在。作为一种创造性的形式，电子游戏出现在许多早期的计算实验中，例如 1958 年为 Donner Model 30 模拟计算机制作的 William Higinbotham 的《Tennis For Two》和 1962 年为 MIT 的 PDP-1 制作的 Tech Model Railroad Club 的Spacewar ，并且适合融入现有的文化形式，如便士街机（Huhtamo 2005）、沉浸式电影实验（Golding 2014）以及探索替代性的艺术运动与电视媒体的接触（Wilson 2007）。到了 20 世纪 60 年代末和 1970 年代，早期的视频游戏产业从一系列非正式实践的商业化中发展起来，尤其集中在北美和英国，伴随着投币街机等一系列技术的出现，以及家用电视游戏机，例如 Magnavox Odyssey 和后来的 Atari 视频计算机系统 (VCS)。在这个年轻的行业稳定成为任何一种主导生产逻辑之前，电子游戏继续以一系列正式和非正式的方式进行创作和发行。随着微型计算机的日益普及，用户能够（并且经常被要求）编写自己的程序，从而形成了爱好者团体，他们可以创建、共享、复制、重新混合和重新共享许多“自制”游戏（Swalwell 2012）。

Much like the music industry several decades later, the nascent videogame industry of the 1960s-1980s struggled to adapt to the ease with which a digital media form could be duplicated and redistributed. That is, the formal industry at the time struggled to find means through which to adequately regulate the prolific informal practices such as homebrew development and copyright infringement. This changed dramatically after the North American videogame industry crash of the early 1980s that almost wiped out the fledging industry. From 1981 to 1984 the coin-operated videogame industry almost halved from just under US$5million to US$2.5million thanks to the rise in popularity of home console machines (Donovan Citation2010, 98). At the same time, the sheer number of low quality videogames available for home consoles such as the Atari VCS saw consumer trust plummet, retailers lowering prices to clear unsold stock, companies going under, and liquidators flooding the market with significantly underpriced titles (Donovan Citation2010, 99). Importantly, a wide range of factors contributed to this crash such as a nationwide recession in the United States and an increased public anxiety about the effects of videogames on children. But it is a flood of cheap, low quality titles and subsequent plummeting consumer trust that would be perceived by the industry itself as the dominant reason for the crash, and which Japanese company Nintendo would work to directly address when it introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES; Famicom in Japan) in 1985.
就像几十年后的音乐产业一样，20 世纪 60 年代至 80 年代新兴的视频游戏产业也在努力适应数字媒体形式的轻松复制和重新分发。也就是说，当时的正规行业正在努力寻找方法来充分监管大量的非正式实践，例如自制软件开发和版权侵权。在 20 世纪 80 年代初北美视频游戏行业崩溃几乎摧毁了新兴行业后，这种情况发生了巨大变化。从 1981 年到 1984 年，由于家用游戏机的普及，投币视频游戏产业几乎减半，从不到 500 万美元降至 250 万美元（Donovan 2010，98）。与此同时，用于家用游戏机（例如 Atari VCS）的大量低质量视频游戏导致消费者信任度直线下降，零售商降低价格以清理未售出的库存，公司破产，清算人以大幅低估的游戏涌入市场（Donovan 2010） ，99）。重要的是，造成这次崩溃的因素很多，例如美国全国范围内的经济衰退以及公众对电子游戏对儿童影响的日益焦虑。但大量廉价、低质量的游戏以及随之而来的消费者信任度的直线下降，被行业本身视为崩溃的主要原因，而日本公司任天堂在推出任天堂娱乐系统时将努力直接解决这个问题。 NES；日本红白机）1985 年。

Casey O’Donnell details Nintendo’s technological, legal, and cultural strategies for responding to the low consumer trust in the industry that would in turn determine the shape and production logics of the videogame industry for the following decades (2014, 186–215). Through a patented lock-and-key hardware design alongside strict editorial guidelines as to just what content would be allowed to appear on the NES, Nintendo maintained strict regulatory control over just what types of videogames—and how many—would be allowed to exist for the NES platform. For the consumer, these strategies were framed as the “Nintendo Seal of Quality”. Existing videogame companies, including Atari, unsuccessfully sued Nintendo for uncompetitive practices, and into the 1990s other home console manufacturers such as Sega and Sony followed Nintendo to establish a particular structure of the industry that ensured console manufacturers, followed by publishers, remained crucial power brokers that videogame creators would have to pass through in order to reach the significant audience share of videogame console owners. The formal videogame industry stabilised, post-crash, into one whose very structure deliberately and aggressively suppressed informal videogame development practices.
凯西·奥唐纳 (Casey O'Donnell) 详细介绍了任天堂为应对消费者对该行业的低信任度而采取的技术、法律和文化策略，这些策略反过来又决定了视频游戏行业未来几十年的形态和生产逻辑 (2014, 186-215)。通过获得专利的锁和钥匙硬件设计以及关于允许哪些内容出现在 NES 上的严格编辑指南，任天堂对允许存在的视频游戏类型和数量保持严格的监管控制。 NES平台。对于消费者来说，这些策略被称为“任天堂质量印记”。包括雅达利在内的现有视频游戏公司以不竞争行为为由起诉任天堂，但未获成功，进入 20 世纪 90 年代，世嘉和索尼等其他家用游戏机制造商效仿任天堂，建立了特定的行业结构，确保游戏机制造商（其次是发行商）仍然是重要的权力掮客。视频游戏创作者必须通过才能获得视频游戏主机所有者的大量观众份额。崩溃后，正式的视频游戏行业趋于稳定，其结构本身就刻意且积极地压制非正式的视频游戏开发实践。

As console manufacturers competed to convince consumers to commit to their platform over the competition’s, increases in computational power and graphical fidelity became a significant factor of the ‘console wars’—most significantly in the transitions from 2 D to 3 D environments. Each few years a new ‘generation’ of home consoles would emerge with greater technological affordances—the Super NES replacing the NES, the PlayStation 3 replacing the PlayStation 2—and, consequentially, the resources required to produce videogames for each new platform constantly grew to meet the heightened bar. Budgets and development team sizes grew exponentially, as did the financial burden of accessing the console manufacturers’ software development kits required to develop for their closed platforms. As the cost of development rose, the new videogame industry consolidated its target audience almost exclusively to teenage and young adult males (Kirkpatrick Citation2012; Keogh Citation2016), significantly narrowing the expected genres and narratives explored by the increasingly conservative and risk-adverse industry.
随着游戏机制造商竞相说服消费者使用他们的平台而不是竞争对手的平台，计算能力和图形保真度的提高成为“游戏机战争”的一个重要因素——最重要的是从 2D 到 3D 环境的转变。每隔几年就会出现新一代的家用游戏机，其技术能力更强——Super NES 取代了 NES，PlayStation 3 取代了 PlayStation 2——因此，为每个新平台制作视频游戏所需的资源不断增长到满足加高的酒吧。预算和开发团队规模呈指数级增长，访问控制台制造商为其封闭平台进行开发所需的软件开发套件的财务负担也呈指数级增长。随着开发成本的上升，新的视频游戏行业将其目标受众几乎全部集中在青少年和年轻成年男性（Kirkpatrick 2012；Keogh 2016），这大大缩小了日益保守和规避风险的行业所探索的预期类型和叙事。

Together, these factors ensured smaller teams and hobbyist creators were priced out of the dominant development and distribution platforms through the 1990s, and that those most likely to develop an interest in playing or creating videogames during this time were the men whose socially normalised interests were those most likely to be represented in the formalised industry’s products of the time (Wajcman Citation1991; Anthropy Citation2012). Without the visibility of alternative forms of videogame development, this period of aggressive formalisation from the late 1980s through to the early 2000s normalised a cultural imagination of the videogame as consumer software driven by innovations in processing power and graphical fidelity, an increasing amount of content and scale, and limited to a finite number of action-centric genres. While it remained possible to create and distribute small videogames on personal computers, these videogames could no longer compete with the commercial offerings of the console manufacturers and third-party publishers in terms of technological spectacle. Ultimately, the formal industry determined how videogames would be evaluated in such a way that only the formal industry would have the resources and ability to develop and distribute videogames that would be evaluated as being of good quality.
这些因素共同确保了 20 世纪 90 年代，规模较小的团队和业余爱好者创作者被排除在占主导地位的开发和发行平台之外，而那些在这段时间内最有可能对玩或创作视频游戏产生兴趣的人，正是那些社会正常化兴趣的人最有可能在当时正规化行业的产品中得到体现（Wajcman 1991；Anthropy 2012）。由于没有其他形式的视频游戏开发的可见性，从 20 世纪 80 年代末到 2000 年代初的这段激进的正规化时期，将视频游戏的文化想象正常化为由处理能力和图形保真度创新驱动的消费软件、不断增加的内容和内容。规模，并仅限于有限数量的以动作为中心的类型。尽管仍然可以在个人计算机上创建和分发小型视频游戏，但这些视频游戏在技术奇观方面无法再与游戏机制造商和第三方发行商的商业产品竞争。最终，正规行业决定了如何评估视频游戏，只有正规行业才有资源和能力来开发和发行被评估为优质的视频游戏。

In his 2014 book Developer’s Dilemma, O’Donnell draws from extensive anthropological fieldwork in North American and Indian videogame development studios between 2004 and 2008 to paint a picture of creative labour within this aggressively formalised videogame industry as strained, exploited, and unsustainable. A culture of top-down secrecy and self-censorship sustains a power imbalance that ensures individual videogame industry workers take on the most risk while corporate publishers and console manufacturers maintain the most control and largest profit margins. In this model, innovation is stifled by distribution brokers working to minimise risk on increasingly expensive products by reiterating on the same ideas and franchises. Privately owned software and a lack of cross-discipline protocols require the reinvention of basic processes on each new project, rather than building on an increasingly large communal body of knowledge and techniques. At the same time, amateur and junior developers—as well as those situated in geographical regions beyond the Global North-centric publishers—struggle to gain access to either the mentorship or tools required to develop their own skills. Through technological, legal, and social strategies, the formalised videogame industry works to sustain its own hegemonic control over who is able to create and distribute videogames by limiting the channels of development and distribution to those it has direct regulatory control over.
在 2014 年出版的《开发者困境》一书中，奥唐纳借鉴了 2004 年至 2008 年间在北美和印度视频游戏开发工作室进行的广泛人类学实地调查，描绘了这个激进的正规化视频游戏行业中的创造性劳动的情况：紧张、剥削和不可持续。自上而下的保密和自我审查文化维持了权力不平衡，确保视频游戏行业的个体工人承担最大的风险，而企业发行商和游戏机制造商则保持最大的控制权和最大的利润率。在这种模式中，分销经纪人通过重申相同的想法和特许经营权来最大限度地降低日益昂贵的产品的风险，从而扼杀了创新。私有软件和缺乏跨学科协议需要重新发明每个新项目的基本流程，而不是建立在日益庞大的公共知识和技术体系之上。与此同时，业余开发者和初级开发者，以及那些位于以北半球为中心的出版商以外地理区域的开发者，都在努力获得发展自己技能所需的指导或工具。通过技术、法律和社会策略，正规化的视频游戏行业通过将开发和发行渠道限制在其直接监管控制的范围内，努力维持其对谁能够创建和发行视频游戏的霸权控制。

Crucially, informal videogame development practices did not disappear entirely during the 1990s but became overshadowed by and in many ways dependent on the strictly regulated processes of the formalised industry that presented itself as the arbiter of aesthetic quality. Nicolls’s research on bootleg consoles in South Korea (2019, forthcoming) and Anthropy’s investigation of the homebrew cultures that emerged around ZZT (Citation2014) highlight just some of the alternative development cultures that existed on the fringes of this time. More visible was the emergence of mods (short for modifications) for PC titles, where hobbyists and amateurs would alter the code or assets of existing commercial PC titles such as Doom or Half-Life and redistribute these remixed creations (Sotamaa Citation2010; Nieborg and van der Graaf Citation2008). Mods could range from the inclusion of different characters or models in an existing game to the creation of alternative levels, bug fixes or polish improvements, or the alteration of the game’s code and assets into new experiences hardly identifiable as the original game. Modders worked in a grey area of legality, often in breach of copyright law and end-user license agreements, but also often added commercial value to the games they modified. Some publishers would attempt to clamp down on and prevent the distribution of mods, but others embraced the practice and ensured pipelines existed that could subsume the more popular work of modders into new formal game releases (such as happened with Counter Strike, which started as a modification for Valve’s Half-Life).
至关重要的是，非正式的视频游戏开发实践并没有在 20 世纪 90 年代完全消失，而是被正规化行业的严格监管流程所掩盖，并且在许多方面依赖于正规化行业的严格监管流程，而正规化行业将自己视为审美质量的仲裁者。 Nicolls 对韩国盗版游戏机的研究（2019 年，即将出版）和 Anthropy 对ZZT周围出现的自制文化的调查（2014 年）突出了当时存在于边缘的一些替代开发文化。更明显的是 PC 游戏 mod（修改的缩写）的出现，爱好者和业余爱好者可以更改现有商业 PC 游戏（例如《毁灭战士》或《半条命》 ）的代码或资产，并重新分发这些重新混合的作品（Sotamaa 2010；Nieborg 和 van格拉夫 2008）。模组的范围可以包括在现有游戏中包含不同的角色或模型，到创建替代关卡、错误修复或改进，或者将游戏的代码和资产更改为难以识别为原始游戏的新体验。模组制作者在合法性的灰色地带工作，经常违反版权法和最终用户许可协议，但也经常为他们修改的游戏增加商业价值。一些发行商会试图限制和阻止 mod 的分发，但其他发行商则接受这种做法，并确保存在管道，可以将 mod 制作者更受欢迎的作品纳入新的正式游戏版本中（例如《反恐精英》 ，该游戏最初是作为Valve 的半衰期的修改）。

As the most visible informal videogame developers of the 1990s and early 2000s, it isn’t surprising that modders—and the more formalised ‘user-generated content’ creators producing game content through formal editing tools supplied with commercial videogames—received much attention by early videogame scholarship. At a time of enthusiasm around active fan cultures and participatory audiences (Jenkins Citation2006) and “counterplay” (Galloway Citation2006), the modder exemplified the seemingly heightened agency of the videogame player—and digital media user more generally—as they played with the videogame itself to “co-create” (Banks Citation2013) new and alternative experiences and meanings. More critically, though, scholars have also highlighted the ambiguous overlap between play and labour where modders and user-generated content creators, through their “precarious playbour”, produce capital for formal publishers and prolong the commercial lifespan of a videogame product, typically without remuneration (Kücklich Citation2005). In this time of aggressive formalisation, informal creators were not necessarily empowered by modding and creating approved content for the formal industry’s products, but limited to these as the only viable informal options for meeting the technologically-driven standards of videogames of the time.
作为 20 世纪 90 年代和 2000 年代初期最引人注目的非正式视频游戏开发者，改装者以及通过商业视频游戏附带的正式编辑工具制作游戏内容的更正式的“用户生成内容”创作者在早期受到了广泛关注，这并不奇怪。视频游戏奖学金。在活跃的粉丝文化和参与性观众（Jenkins 2006）和“反击”（Galloway 2006）充满热情的时代，模组制作者体现了电子游戏玩家（以及更广泛的数字媒体用户）在玩电子游戏时看似增强的代理性自身“共同创造”（Banks 2013）新的、另类的体验和意义。不过，更重要的是，学者们也强调了游戏与劳动之间的模糊重叠，即模组制作者和用户生成的内容创作者通过他们的“不稳定的游戏”为正式发行商生产资本，并延长视频游戏产品的商业寿命，通常没有报酬（Kücklich 2005）。在这个积极正规化的时代，非正式创作者不一定能够通过为正规行业的产品修改和创建批准的内容来获得权力，但仅限于这些作为满足当时技术驱动的视频游戏标准的唯一可行的非正式选择。

The legal, technological, and discursive work of console manufacturers and publishers through the 1990s to regulate videogame distribution normalised a demarcation between those ‘professional’ videogames released commercially and the ‘amateur’ work of enthusiast ‘end-users’; this has, in turn, rendered the broader range of creative practices that are videogame development opaque. Recontextualising this history of videogame creative practice as not simply the natural maturation of the videogame industry but of formal actors aggressively determining how videogames are perceived and evaluated allows this article to now consider the broader range of informal development practices that constitute contemporary videogame creation in a new light.
整个 90 年代，游戏机制造商和发行商为规范视频游戏发行而进行的法律、技术和话语工作，规范了商业发行的“专业”视频游戏与狂热“最终用户”的“业余”作品之间的界限；这反过来又使得视频游戏开发的更广泛的创意实践变得不透明。将电子游戏创作实践的历史重新背景化，不仅是电子游戏行业的自然成熟，而且是正式参与者积极决定如何看待和评估电子游戏的过程，使本文现在能够考虑更广泛的非正式开发实践，这些实践构成了当代电子游戏创作的新视角。光。

2000 s-2010s: the videogame industry as intensely in/formalised
2000 年代至 2010 年代：视频游戏行业高度成熟/正规化

Like O’Donnell’s observations on the game industry’s culture of secrecy, Anna Anthropy identifies a “culture of alienation” in videogame development, describing the videogame industry as being in a “round-the-drain cycle” where “games are designed by a small, male-dominated culture and marketed to a small, male-dominated audience, which in turn produces the next small, male-dominated generation of game designers” (2012, 13). However, Anthropy also sensed at her time of writing that this situation was increasingly untenable. Her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters functioned as a manifesto of sorts for the validations of informal videogame development practices detached from the market-driven values and sanctioned user-generated content tools of the formalised industry. Anthropy directly challenges the secretive development culture and commodity-driven aesthetics of videogame design to call for a form of videogame development more akin to the creation of zines: “as personal artifacts instead of impersonal creations by teams of forty-five artists and fifteen programmers” (2012, 9). Videogames, Anthropy suggested, didn’t have to be commercially viable to be valid, but simply had to communicate ideas effectively. What videogames needed to achieve this, Anthropy predicted, was for a wider range of people to be able to participate in videogame creation. Videogames needed their own printing press, their own GarageBand or Kodak camera to liberate the creative craft of videogame development from the highly specialist skills and expensive equipment they required in the formal industry.
与 O'Donnell 对游戏行业保密文化的观察一样，Anna Anthropy 也指出了视频游戏开发中的“异化文化” ，将视频游戏行业描述为处于“循环周期”，其中“游戏是由小公司设计的”。 ，男性主导的文化，并向一小部分男性主导的受众进行营销，这反过来又产生了下一代小规模的、男性主导的游戏设计师”（2012，13）。然而，Anthropy 在撰写本文时也意识到这种情况越来越难以维持。她的书《视频游戏 Zinesters 的崛起》在某种程度上是验证非正式视频游戏开发实践的宣言，它脱离了市场驱动的价值观，并认可了正规行业的用户生成内容工具。人性直接挑战视频游戏设计的秘密开发文化和商品驱动的美学，呼吁一种更类似于杂志创作的视频游戏开发形式：“作为个人艺术品，而不是由 45 名艺术家和 15 名程序员组成的团队的非个人创作” （2012年，9）。人类学认为，电子游戏不一定要在商业上可行才有效，而只需有效地传达想法即可。 Anthropy 预测，电子游戏要实现这一目标，需要让更广泛的人能够参与电子游戏的创作。视频游戏需要自己的印刷机、自己的 GarageBand 或柯达相机，以将视频游戏开发的创意工艺从正规行业所需的高度专业技能和昂贵设备中解放出来。

The nascent changes that Anthropy sensed were thanks, in large part, to the increased ubiquity of ‘indie’ and ‘mobile’ videogames in the last half of the 2000s. The increased availability in Western countries of highspeed internet connections and subsequent normalisation of digital distribution marketplaces for videogames made it increasingly feasible for amateur videogame developers to circumvent the entrenched brokers of console manufacturers and publishers to release smaller personal computer (PC) or mobile games of a lower budget for more niche audiences through platforms such as Valve’s Steam or Apple’s App Store. The console manufacturers were quick to adapt to and re-formalise this new area of relatively informal development by making their own nascent digital storefronts (Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network) more open and accessible to indie games and, more recently, releasing versions of well-known console franchises on mobile platforms in well-established indie genres, such as Mario Run, which turns Super Mario Bros into an endless runner game. Indie and mobile developers often work in much smaller teams than the studios creating traditional console titles and had significantly smaller budgets. The games they create would not try to compete with the technological spectacle of blockbuster games like Call of Duty but instead find inspiration from earlier generations, especially the pixel-art games of the 1990s. Early indie successes such as Braid, Super Meat Boy, Spelunky, and Fez are littered with references, visually and mechanically, to popular franchises from the NES and SNES such as Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda.
Anthropy 感受到的新生变化在很大程度上要归功于 2000 年代后半叶“独立”和“移动”视频游戏的普及。西方国家高速互联网连接的增加以及随后视频游戏数字发行市场的规范化，使得业余视频游戏开发商越来越有可能绕过游戏机制造商和发行商的根深蒂固的经纪人，发行规模较小的个人电脑（PC）或手机游戏。通过 Valve 的 Steam 或苹果的 App Store 等平台，为更多小众受众降低预算。游戏机制造商很快就适应并重新规范了这一相对非正式的开发新领域，使他们自己的新生数字店面（Xbox Live Arcade、PlayStation Network）更加开放，更易于独立游戏使用，并且最近还发布了- 移动平台上成熟的独立游戏类型的知名游戏机系列，例如《马里奥跑酷》 ，它将《超级马里奥兄弟》变成了一款无尽的跑酷游戏。独立和移动开发者通常在比创建传统游戏机游戏的工作室小得多的团队中工作，并且预算也少得多。他们创造的游戏不会试图与《使命召唤》等热门游戏的技术奇观相竞争，而是从前几代游戏中寻找灵感，尤其是 20 世纪 90 年代的像素艺术游戏。早期成功的独立游戏，如《时空幻境》 、 《超级食肉男孩》 、 《洞穴探险》和《菲斯》 ，在视觉和机制上都大量参考了 NES 和 SNES 的热门系列游戏，如《超级马里奥兄弟》和《塞尔达传说》 。

A growing body of literature has focused on the unique struggles and practices of indie game development and distribution (Parker and Jenson Citation2017; Joseph Citation2013; Swalwell Citation2007). However, as McCrea (Citation2013) highlights, ‘indie’ and ‘amateur’ are not synonymous; ‘indie’ videogames are but a more commercially-orientated subset of a far broader and more opaque amateur videogame development ecosystem that is itself ‘“the norm by which game development occurs, and out of which commercial game production continually emerges, reacts and shifts” (2013, 179). What the emergence of indie and mobile games points to is that while distribution of videogames became less restrictively regulated and more accessible for informal creators in the late 2000s, development remained largely inaccessible to those without high levels of technical skills and who lacked an interest in the narrow band of action-centric genres, and as such the early indie and mobile scenes largely consisted of the same narrow demographics as the blockbuster industry. Nevertheless, as the increased visibility of indie development in the late 2000s helped cultivate new player demographics, independent and small-scale videogame development outside the traditional bottlenecks of console manufacturers and blockbuster publishers became increasingly attractive to both emerging and established developers.
越来越多的文献关注独立游戏开发和发行的独特斗争和实践（Parker and Jenson 2017；Joseph 2013；Swalwell 2007）。然而，正如 McCrea（2013）所强调的那样，“独立”和“业余”并不是同义词；它们是独立的。 “独立”视频游戏只是更广泛、更不透明的业余视频游戏开发生态系统的一个更以商业为导向的子集，该生态系统本身就是“游戏开发发生的规范，以及商业游戏生产不断出现、反应和转变的规范” （2013，179）。独立游戏和手机游戏的出现表明，虽然在 2000 年代末，视频游戏的发行受到的限制越来越少，并且对于非正式创作者来说更容易获得，但对于那些没有高水平技术技能且对游戏缺乏兴趣的人来说，开发仍然基本上无法进行。以动作为中心的狭窄类型，因此早期的独立和移动场景主要由与大片行业相同的狭隘人口统计数据组成。然而，随着 2000 年代末独立开发的知名度不断提高，有助于培养新的玩家群体，摆脱游戏机制造商和大牌发行商传统瓶颈的独立和小规模视频游戏开发对新兴和成熟的开发商越来越有吸引力。

Subsequently, a previously obscure sector of the formal videogame industry came into its own: third-party game engines. Game engines provide the foundation for a game project’s pipeline, providing the software environment where the diverse range of assets and labour of artists, programmers, audio engineers, designers, and writers are brought together. Developing a game engine and the other tools required for the game development pipeline is a highly technical and expensive process. With the rise of smaller scale development in the late 2000s, the demands for accessible game engines to alleviate a lack of massive programming teams increased dramatically. Of the vast range of third-party game engines that have emerged over the past decade, none have been as significant as Unity. The Unity game engine is both robust enough to be used by many small- to mid-size studios and also accessible enough to be accessible by amateurs and hobbyists. Whereas a ‘Pro’ Unity license with extra customisation costs US$125 a month, a ‘Personal’ license, with access to most of the engine’s development tools, is free. Crucially, the Personal license can still be used for commercialised videogame development, so long as the user has an annual revenue capacity below US$100,000. Further, a large community of developers build extensions distributed through Unity’s Asset Store that can then be used by other developers in their own game projects.
随后，正式视频游戏行业中一个以前默默无闻的部门开始崭露头角：第三方游戏引擎。游戏引擎为游戏项目的流程提供了基础，提供了将艺术家、程序员、音频工程师、设计师和作家的各种资产和劳动汇集在一起​​的软件环境。开发游戏引擎和游戏开发流程所需的其他工具是一个技术性很强且成本高昂的过程。随着 2000 年代末小规模开发的兴起，对可访问的游戏引擎的需求急剧增加，以缓解大规模编程团队的缺乏。在过去十年中出现的众多第三方游戏引擎中，没有一个像 Unity 那样重要。 Unity 游戏引擎不仅足够强大，可供许多中小型工作室使用，而且也足够易于业余爱好者和爱好者使用。具有额外定制功能的“专业”Unity 许可证每月费用为 125 美元，而可访问大多数引擎开发工具的“个人”许可证是免费的。至关重要的是，只要用户的年收入能力低于 10 万美元，个人许可证仍然可以用于商业化视频游戏开发。此外，大型开发人员社区构建通过 Unity 的资源商店分发的扩展，然后其他开发人员可以在自己的游戏项目中使用这些扩展。

The impact of Unity (and to a lesser extent, Epic’s similar Unreal engine) on videogame development practices cannot be overstated. While resources still vary significantly between professional and amateur developers, many now use the same tools for creation, liberating informal developers from the rigidly regulated end-user positionality of ‘modder’ to instead be regulated by the same middleware actors as the formal developers. Consequentially, skillsets are becoming standardised and the ability for actors to transition across the in/formal divide is becoming more feasible. The culture of secrecy and subsequent endless cycle of re-inventing basic systems that O’Donnell (Citation2014) sees as holding back innovation in the games industry is challenged by this broader, more collaborative community of independent and informal developers less anxious about holding trade secrets close to their chest.
Unity（以及较小程度上 Epic 的类似 Unreal 引擎）对视频游戏开发实践的影响怎么强调也不为过。虽然专业开发人员和业余开发人员之间的资源仍然存在很大差异，但许多人现在使用相同的工具进行创建，将非正式开发人员从“modder”的严格监管的最终用户位置中解放出来，转而受到与正式开发人员相同的中间件参与者的监管。因此，技能组合正在变得标准化，参与者跨越非正式/正式鸿沟的能力也变得更加可行。 O'Donnell (2014) 认为，保密文化以及随之而来的无休止的重新发明基本系统的循环阻碍了游戏行业的创新，而这种文化正受到更广泛、更具协作性的独立和非正式开发者社区的挑战，这些开发者对保守商业秘密不那么焦虑靠近他们的胸部。

Crucially, this was not simply a technological shift, but also a cultural one. Accessible game development engines have existed since the 1990s, such as Flash, RPG Maker (Ito Citation2005), and GameMaker (Anthropy Citation2012). However, with smaller-scale and low-fidelity videogames being reconsidered by players thanks to the rise of indie and mobile development, these engines themselves have been re-evaluated by developers as something other than second-class software for amateurs. GameMaker, for instance, which at the turn of the century was often used in high schools as a simple introduction to videogame development, was responsible for a number of early indie successes such as Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box and Dennaton Games’s Hotline Miami. Elsewhere, the open-source interactive fiction software Twine saw a renaissance of text-based narrative-driven videogames, driven primarily by queer and transgender creators (see kopas Citation2015). Creating tools for streamlined informal development and distribution has itself become something of a trend with a number of small development tools released in recent years such as Bitsy, Emojica, Pico-8, and Scratch.
至关重要的是，这不仅仅是一种技术转变，也是一种文化转变。可访问的游戏开发引擎自 20 世纪 90 年代以来就已存在，例如 Flash、RPG Maker (Ito 2005) 和 GameMaker (Anthropy 2012)。然而，由于独立和移动开发的兴起，随着玩家重新考虑较小规模和低保真度的视频游戏，这些引擎本身已被开发人员重新评估，不再是业余爱好者的二流软件。例如，GameMaker 在世纪之交经常在高中用作视频游戏开发的简单介绍，它促成了许多早期独立游戏的成功，例如 Vlambeer 的Super Crate Box和 Dennaton Games 的Hotline Miami。在其他地方，开源互动小说软件 Twine 见证了基于文本的叙事驱动视频游戏的复兴，主要由酷儿和跨性别创作者推动（参见 kopas 2015）。创建用于简化非正式开发和分发的工具本身已成为一种趋势，近年来发布了许多小型开发工具，例如 Bitsy、Emojica、Pico-8 和 Scratch。

Anthropy called it correctly. Videogames have obtained their printing press through the rise and acceptance of third-party engines. Videogames, as a creative industry, are being reconfigured by the increased credibility of informal development practices as a feasible avenue towards reaching an audience. After 25 years of aggressively policed formalisation, the stranglehold of the North American, Western Europe, and Japanese publishers and console manufactures has loosened as small indie development studios across Europe, Australia, and Asia have grown into mid- and even large-sized independent studios. Runaway successes on mobile platforms, such as Finland’s Supercell, Australia’s Hipster Whale, and Vietnam’s Dong Nguyen now ensure that ‘indie’ developers operate at all scales, bringing with them an openness and resistance to the traditional industry’s culture of secrecy. While, as Kerr rightfully notes, the capital produced by the videogame industry remains highly centralised in a small number of multinational media companies such as ZeniMax, TenCent, and Activision (2017, 50), the distribution of those who create videogames is increasingly dispersed across the developed and developing world in a number of “transnational” contexts (2017, 55; see also Parker and Jenson Citation2017).
人类学正确地称呼它。电子游戏通过第三方引擎的兴起和接受而获得印刷机。作为一个创意产业，电子游戏正在被重新配置，非正式开发实践的可信度不断提高，成为接触观众的可行途径。经过 25 年严格监管的正规化之后，随着欧洲、澳大利亚和亚洲的小型独立开发工作室成长为中型甚至大型独立工作室，北美、西欧和日本发行商和游戏机制造商的束缚已经放松。 。芬兰的 Supercell、澳大利亚的 Hipster Whale 和越南的 Dong Nguyen 等移动平台上的巨大成功现在确保了“独立”开发商能够在各种规模上开展业务，从而带来了对传统行业保密文化的开放性和抵抗力。正如 Kerr 正确指出的那样，视频游戏行业产生的资本仍然高度集中于少数跨国媒体公司，如 ZeniMax、TenCent 和 Activision (2017, 50)，但视频游戏创作者的分布却越来越分散。发达国家和发展中国家在许多“跨国”背景下的情况（2017 年，55；另见 Parker 和 Jenson，2017 年）。

It’s at this juncture—between the aggressively formalised and hegemonic industry that stands in for videogame creative practice as it is commonly perceived and the emerging heterogenous spectrum of in/formal developers and studios that do not fit within this model—that a range of cultural tensions and blindspots have emerged around the videogame field in recent years. In the final section, this article will briefly outline several of these to highlight the complexities and necessity of account for informal videogame development practices.
正是在这个关头——在代表普遍认为的视频游戏创意实践的激进的正规化和霸权产业与不符合这种模式的新兴的异质/正规开发商和工作室之间——出现了一系列文化紧张局势近年来，视频游戏领域出现了盲点。在最后一节中，本文将简要概述其中的几个，以强调考虑非正式视频游戏开发实践的复杂性和必要性。

A cultural bottleneck 文化瓶颈

The videogame industry is entering a period of intensified in/formal co-dependency between the traditionally understood formal videogame industry and the vast range of informal hobbyist, amateur, and enthusiast creators at its margins. The evidence of this is not simply in the number of visible creators crossing the in/formal divide, such as House House, but in the shifting discourses around the industry and consumer cultures that have taken place in recent years as a wider range of creator demographics find their labour increasingly validated and visible around what has been a stubbornly hegemonic creative industry. As Young highlights: “[As everyday gamemakers] increasingly contribute to the economic development of the video game industry, the industry has simultaneously enabled these gamemakers to contribute to the cultural discourse surrounding working conditions, information practices, and definitions of games.” (2018, 12). A wider range of gamemakers with different values and ambitions now have an audible voice in industry discourse—interviewed and reviewed by game journalism outlets, followed on social media, invited to talk at industry events—and are creating sites of tension where they clash with those values and ambitions established by the aggressively formalised industry and its cultivated audience.
视频游戏行业正在进入一个传统上理解的正式视频游戏行业与边缘的广大非正式爱好者、业余爱好者和狂热创作者之间强化的内部/正式相互依赖的时期。证明这一点的证据不仅仅体现在跨越非正式/正式鸿沟的可见创作者的数量（例如 House House），还体现在近年来随着更广泛的创作者群体发生的围绕行业和消费文化的讨论的转变发现他们的劳动在顽固的霸权创意产业中越来越得到验证和可见。正如 Young 所强调的：“[随着普通游戏制作者]为视频游戏行业的经济发展做出越来越多的贡献，该行业同时也使这些游戏制作者能够为围绕工作条件、信息实践和游戏定义的文化话语做出贡献。” （2018年，12）。现在，拥有不同价值观和抱负的更广泛的游戏制作人在行业话语中拥有了清晰的声音——接受游戏新闻媒体的采访和评论，在社交媒体上关注，受邀在行业活动中发表演讲——并且正在创造与这些人发生冲突的紧张场所。积极正规化的行业及其培养的受众所建立的价值观和抱负。

As the gamer identity and evaluative notion of gameplay emerged during (and at the service of) the period of aggressive formalisation through the 1990s (see Shaw Citation2012; Kirkpatrick Citation2012; Cote Citation2018), this cultivated enthusiast videogame culture has found itself confronted by the products of informal videogame practices that are increasingly visible in discourses around the videogame industry. This final section highlights this cultural bottleneck between, on one hand, a great opening up of the ability to create and distribute a wider range of videogames and, on the other hand, a conservative consumer culture of distribution platforms and enthusiast discourse that are used to videogames being a specific, homogenised practice. Highlighting this cultural bottleneck will underline the urgent need for reassessing the narrow lens through which the videogame industry has until recently been assessed and imagined—by both players and researchers alike—and the need to develop means to distinguish between different modes of videogame creation and their associated value across the in/formal divide.
随着游戏玩家身份和游戏玩法的评价概念在 20 世纪 90 年代激进的形式化时期出现（并为其服务）（参见 Shaw 2012；Kirkpatrick 2012；Cote 2018），这种有教养的狂热电子游戏文化发现自己面临着产品的挑战。非正式视频游戏实践在视频游戏行业的讨论中越来越明显。最后一部分强调了这种文化瓶颈，一方面是创造和发行更广泛的视频游戏的能力的极大开放，另一方面是习惯于发行平台和爱好者话语的保守消费者文化。电子游戏是一种特定的、同质化的实践。强调这一文化瓶颈将强调迫切需要重新评估迄今为止玩家和研究人员对视频游戏行业进行评估和想象的狭隘视角，并且需要开发方法来区分不同的视频游戏创作模式及其各自的特点。跨越非正式/正式鸿沟的相关价值。

The Independent Games Festival (IGF), taking place as part of GDC each year, ensures that independent game development is visible at the largest industry event and has been the site of several controversies that point to the tensions inherent to an in/formalised creative industry. Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life (created with the open source Adventure Game Studio software) won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2013 IGF Awards. The following day at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC expo floor, Hofmeier removed his game from display, spraypainted “HOWLING DOGS” over the booth’s placard, and left a laptop where visiting journalists and publisher representatives would expect to find the year’s grand prize winner. The laptop was not running Cart Life but instead the interactive fiction game Howling Dogs produced by writer and developer Porpentine using the free software Twine. Industry news outlet Gamasutra, reporting on Hofmeier’s act, noted this resistance of the spotlight and industrial approval in favour of highlighting a very fringe videogame “elevates an important undertone of this year's independent game community: A passionate interest in being outspoken in support for previously-unheard creators, in promoting accessible tools and new voices, and in games' potential for individual self-expression” (Alexander Citation2013).
独立游戏节 (IGF) 每年作为 GDC 的一部分举行，确保独立游戏开发在最大的行业活动中得到关注，并且引发了一些争议，这些争议指出了内/正规化创意产业固有的紧张局势。 Richard Hofmeier 的Cart Life （使用开源 Adventure Game Studio 软件创建）荣获 2013 年 IGF 奖 Seumas McNally 大奖。第二天，在 GDC 展览馆的 IGF 展馆，霍夫迈尔将他的游戏从展示中撤下，在展位的标语牌上喷上了“嚎叫的狗”，并留下了一台笔记本电脑，来访的记者和发行商代表希望能在其中找到当年的大奖获得者。这台笔记本电脑运行的不是Cart Life ，而是作家兼开发商 Porpentine 使用免费软件 Twine 制作的互动小说游戏Howling Dogs 。行业新闻媒体Gamasutra在报道 Hofmeier 的行为时指出，这种聚光灯的抵制和行业认可有利于突出一款非常边缘的视频游戏，“提升了今年独立游戏社区的一个重要基调：对直言不讳地支持以前的游戏的热情兴趣”闻所未闻的创造者，在推广易于使用的工具和新声音方面，以及在游戏的个人自我表达潜力方面”（Alexander 2013）。

These undertones would come to a head a year later when Zoë Quinn’s Twine game, Depression Quest, appeared on the videogame distribution platform Steam. A free game that had already received critical attention while available on Quinn’s own website for its nuanced presentation of mental illness, Quinn decided to make the game available for free through Steam to help the game reach a much broader audience that it would not find Quinn’s own website. Almost immediately, the game began to receive negative reviews from the fan communities residing in Steam’s discussion boards. Steam users demonstrated an incredulity that the game effectively just required reading and clicking on links, as opposed to more accepted forms of ‘gameplay’ (see Sitebender Citation2014 for one example). The means through which this creative work communicated an idea through hypertext (itself a well-established form of interactive literature) was lost on a community used to a particular form of videogame experience focused on action and visuals. Confusion from fan cultures as to how such a game could be critically successful melded with a historic and misogynistic distrust of game journalists and gender diverse game developers to spawn conspiracy theories of collusion and bribery. A former partner of Quinn’s deliberately fanned the flames with the release of Quinn’s private information. The harassment and abuse that Quinn received for releasing a free game about mental illness on Steam was the tipping point for what would come to be known as Gamergate (see Shaw and Chess, Citation2015), and which is perhaps the most prominent and negative example of these more diverse informal development communities finding their increased visibility and influence clashing with pre-existing and ingrained videogame cultures cultivated by the aggressively formalised industry.
一年后，当 Zoë Quinn 的 Twine 游戏《Depression Quest 》出现在视频游戏发行平台 Steam 上时，这些暗示达到了顶峰。这款免费游戏在 Quinn 自己的网站上因其对精神疾病的细致入微的呈现而受到了广泛的关注，Quinn 决定通过 Steam 免费提供该游戏，以帮助该游戏覆盖 Quinn 自己的更广泛的受众群体。网站。几乎立刻，该游戏就开始受到 Steam 讨论区粉丝社区的负面评价。 Steam 用户表示怀疑，认为游戏实际上只需要阅读和点击链接，而不是更被接受的“游戏玩法”形式（参见 Sitebender 2014 的一个例子）。这种创造性的作品通过超文本（本身是一种行之有效的互动文学形式）传达想法的方式，在习惯于专注于动作和视觉的特定形式的视频游戏体验的社区中消失了。粉丝文化对这样一款游戏如何能够取得巨大成功的困惑与对游戏记者和性别多元化游戏开发者的历史性和厌恶女性的不信任融合在一起，催生了共谋和贿赂的阴谋论。奎因的一位前合伙人故意煽风点火，泄露了奎因的私人信息。 Quinn 因在 Steam 上发布一款有关精神疾病的免费游戏而受到骚扰和辱骂，这成为后来被称为“玩家门”的转折点（参见 Shaw 和 Chess，2015 年），这也许是最突出和最负面的例子。这些更加多样化的非正式发展社区发现，其知名度和影响力的提高与积极正规化行业培育的现有且根深蒂固的视频游戏文化发生冲突。

Valve’s Steam platform, as the dominant digital distribution channel for PC games, has been ground zero for many of these in/formal clashes. It is, on one hand, home to dominant and toxic online videogame cultures and a platform that is seen to formalise what counts as a ‘real’ PC videogame to these fan cultures. On the other hand, it is the most accessible platform through which to digitally distribute videogames for indie and amateur developers striving to reach a broader audience without navigating the complex regulator procedures and bespoke technologies of home consoles. More recently than Gamergate, developers of games with sexual content, such as You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter by brothers James and Joe Cox, have found their games removed entirely from Steam by Valve, despite a number of commercial blockbuster games with much more explicitly rendered sex scenes—such as The Witcher 3 or Dragon Age: Origins—being permitted. You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter used low fidelity art and horror genre tropes to simulate the experience of a sexually curious young person in the 1990s attempting to stealthily find pornography through a dial-up connection on the family computer. In a blog post about the banning, James Cox notes how Steam perpetuates a particular understanding of what videogames are through the content it allows and disallows and, in doing so, prevents audiences from comprehending a broader range of viable videogame experiences. Referring to a frustrated blog by fellow experimental game designer Nathalie Lawhead (Citation2017), whose critically acclaimed Everything is going to be OK was ridiculed by younger players at an industry event, Cox bemoans that “if the game had monsters, or violence, or death, or used other traditional horror aspects over childhood curiosity, it probably wouldn’t have been banned from Steam” (Cox Citation2017). Instead, as a smaller and personal experience that explored sexual themes, the value of You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter was opaque to Steam and its core users.
Valve 的 Steam 平台作为 PC 游戏的主要数字发行渠道，在许多此类非正式/正式冲突中一直处于零状态。一方面，它是占主导地位且有毒的在线视频游戏文化的发源地，也是一个被视为将这些粉丝文化视为“真正”的 PC 视频游戏正式化的平台。另一方面，它是独立和业余开发者以数字方式分发视频游戏的最容易访问的平台，他们努力接触更广泛的受众，而无需掌握复杂的监管程序和家用游戏机的定制技术。最近，除了 Gamergate 之外，含有色情内容的游戏（例如 James 和 Joe Cox 兄弟的《You Must Be 18 Orerer To Enter》 ）的开发商发现，他们的游戏已被 Valve 完全从 Steam 上删除，尽管许多商业大片游戏都包含色情内容明确渲染的性爱场景——比如《巫师 3》或《龙腾世纪：起源》 ——是被允许的。 《你必须年满 18 岁才能进入》使用低保真艺术和恐怖类型比喻来模拟 20 世纪 90 年代一个对性好奇的年轻人试图通过家庭计算机上的拨号连接偷偷寻找色情内容的经历。在一篇关于禁令的博客文章中，詹姆斯·考克斯 (James Cox) 指出，Steam 如何通过其允许和禁止的内容来延续对视频游戏的特定理解，并在此过程中阻止受众理解更广泛的可行视频游戏体验。 考克斯在提到实验游戏设计师 Nathalie Lawhead（2017 年）发表的一篇令人沮丧的博客时，她广受好评的《一切都会好起来》在一次行业活动中遭到了年轻玩家的嘲笑，考克斯哀叹道：“如果游戏中有怪物、暴力或死亡， ，或者使用其他传统的恐怖元素来超越童年的好奇心，它可能不会被 Steam 禁止”（Cox 2017）。相反，作为一个探索性主题的小型个人体验， 《You Must Be 18 Orerer To Enter》的价值对于 Steam 及其核心用户来说是不透明的。

Other platforms that support the traditional audiences of the formalised game industry have equally struggled to adjust to the increasingly in/formalised state of videogame development and distribution. Twitch, the dominant platform for livestreaming videogame play—which has itself become a complex in/formal creative practice in its own right (see Maccallum-Stewart Citation2013)—and a dominant discovery method for small videogame developers, banned the videogames of Robert Yang—whose games deal with themes and issues surrounding masculinity and homosexuality—for depicted computer-rendered penises. As with Steam, no shortage of formal blockbuster games that depict computer-rendered breasts in sex scenes are played daily on the service with no issue. Discussing Twitch’s inconsistent enforcement of its own content policy during a GDC talk in 2016, Yang notes that the only constant was not to do with the content policed, but that “Twitch allows games with big publishers, but they don’t understand smaller developers” (Yang Citation2016). GDC itself has also faced challenges and criticisms for the US-centric event’s inability to adapt to a globalising development community. At the 2018 conference, a number of invited speakers from emerging videogame development regions (particularly in the Middle-East) were unable to obtain visas to attend the conference (Khan Citation2018).
支持正规化游戏行业传统受众的其他平台同样难以适应电子游戏开发和发行日益正规化的状态。 Twitch 是直播视频游戏的主导平台，它本身已成为一种复杂的非正式/正式的创意实践（参见 Maccallum-Stewart 2013），也是小型视频游戏开发者的主要发现方法，它禁止了 Robert Yang 的视频游戏——他们的游戏涉及有关男性气质和同性恋的主题和问题——描绘计算机渲染的阴茎。与 Steam 一样，每天在该服务上玩的也不乏在性场景中描绘计算机渲染乳房的正式大作游戏，没有任何问题。在 2016 年 GDC 演讲中讨论 Twitch 对其内容政策执行不一致的问题时，Yang 指出，唯一不变的不是内容监管，而是“Twitch 允许与大型发行商合作游戏，但他们不了解小型开发商” （杨2016）。 GDC 本身也因以美国为中心的活动无法适应全球化发展社区而面临挑战和批评。在 2018 年的会议上，一些来自新兴视频游戏开发地区（特别是中东）的受邀演讲者无法获得出席会议的签证（Khan 2018）。

These particularly publicised examples of in/formal videogame development clashing with existing formal establishments demonstrate how the understandings of videogames cultivated by the aggressively formalised industry through the 1980s-2000s have narrowed cultural imaginings of videogames in such a way that the new range of developers more visibly working across the intensified in/formal divide—creating videogame for a vaster range of reasons than has been previously appreciated—are confronting negativity, bemusement, abuse, and outright censorship from dominant consumer audiences and formal distribution platforms even as they are acclaimed by critics, cultural institutions, and industry awards. Informal videogame development practices are expanding the modes of visible and validated videogame development practices that exist in new trajectories, but in the process are being confronted and challenged by a dominant pre-existing imagining of what videogames are and who they are for. Where in/formal creators see personal and expressive creative works worthy of sharing with others, dominant game culture sees poor quality consumer software with a lack of content or commercial value. As necessity-driven entrepreneurs that rarely transcend a position of precarity, informal videogame creators remain subservient to the whims of distribution platforms setup, primarily, to serve the formal videogame industry and its cultivated audience. The clashes, anxieties, and debates detailed in this section point towards a cultural bottleneck as the ability to create and distribute a wider range of videogame works clashes with deeply-rooted expectations, and formal platform policies and corporate identity. They point towards the urgency with which researchers of the videogame industry need to be able to distinguish between the different contexts videogames are created in, the diverse motivations behind their creators, and the broader spectrum of actors that give shape to the videogame industry.
这些特别公开的非正式/正式视频游戏开发与现有正式机构发生冲突的例子表明，在 1980 年代至 2000 年代，积极正规化的行业所培养的对视频游戏的理解如何缩小了视频游戏的文化想象，从而使新的开发者群体更加明显跨越日益加剧的正式/正式鸿沟——制作视频游戏的原因比以前所理解的更广泛——正面临着来自主要消费者受众和正式发行平台的消极、困惑、虐待和彻底审查，即使它们受到了评论家的赞扬，文化机构、行业奖项。非正式的视频游戏开发实践正在扩展存在于新轨迹中的可见且经过验证的视频游戏开发实践的模式，但在此过程中，也面临着对视频游戏是什么以及它们为谁服务的主导性预先存在的想象的挑战。非正式/正式的创作者认为个人和富有表现力的创意作品值得与他人分享，而主流游戏文化则认为消费软件质量低劣，缺乏内容或商业价值。作为需求驱动的企业家，很少超越不稳定的地位，非正式视频游戏创作者仍然屈服于发行平台设置的突发奇想，主要是为了服务正式视频游戏行业及其培养的受众。本节详细介绍的冲突、焦虑和辩论指出了文化瓶颈，因为创作和发行更广泛的视频游戏作品的能力与根深蒂固的期望、正式的平台政策和企业形象相冲突。 他们指出，视频游戏行业的研究人员迫切需要能够区分视频游戏创建的不同背景、其创作者背后的不同动机以及塑造视频游戏行业的更广泛的参与者。

Conclusion 结论

As explored in the first section of this article, Lobato and Thomas see the notion of informality as “an invitation for researchers to view ostensibly stable objects of knowledge from the perspective of… uncertainty” (2015, 12). A shift from stability to uncertainty perfectly describes what has been happening to the videogame industry over the past decade as estabished models of the industry are finding themselves unable to account for the exploding range of informal videogame development practices. It’s crucial, now, that creative industries researchers interested in the massive global videogame industry account for this intensely in/formalised and localised environment. To account for informal videogame development practices is to account for a broader range of videogame creators on their own terms, rather than through pre-existing assumptions of how videogames are produced and distributed that were themselves cultivated by the aggressively formalised industry of the 1990s and 2000s—an industry that had an active stake in rendering informal development practices opaque and subservient. The creative industries researcher, when looking at the contemporary videogame industry, needs to reconsider who makes videogames, for what purpose, with what tools, and for whom. In short: videogames are regularly made for reasons other than commercial distributions and by people other than those formally employed by development studios. We must account for this broader range of informal practices of development and distribution as valid aspects of the industry in their own right, even when they are not market-driven: not as outlier fan, enthusiast, or end-user activity that might one day become an aspect of the videogame industry, but as the much broader field of creative practice that the formal videogame industry is (and has always been) embedded within.
正如本文第一部分所探讨的，洛巴托和托马斯将非正式性的概念视为“邀请研究人员从......不确定性的角度看待表面上稳定的知识对象”（2015，12）。从稳定到不确定的转变完美地描述了过去十年视频游戏行业所发生的情况，因为该行业的既定模型发现自己无法解释非正式视频游戏开发实践的爆炸式增长。现在至关重要的是，对庞大的全球视频游戏产业感兴趣的创意产业研究人员要考虑到这种高度正式化和本地化的环境。解释非正式的视频游戏开发实践就是按照自己的方式解释更广泛的视频游戏创作者，而不是通过 20 世纪 90 年代和 2000 年代积极正规化的行业培育的关于视频游戏如何制作和发行的预先存在的假设——这个行业在使非正式发展实践变得不透明和屈从方面有着积极的利害关系。创意产业研究人员在审视当代视频游戏产业时，需要重新考虑谁制作了视频游戏、出于什么目的、使用什么工具以及为谁制作。简而言之：视频游戏的制作经常出于商业发行以外的原因，并且由开发工作室正式雇用的人员以外的人员制作。 我们必须将这种更广泛的非正式开发和发行实践视为行业本身的有效方面，即使它们不是市场驱动的：而不是作为有一天可能会出现的异常粉丝、爱好者或最终用户活动成为视频游戏行业的一个方面，但作为正式视频游戏行业（并且一直）嵌入的更广泛的创意实践领域。

As the formalising stranglehold of the console manufacturers has loosened, a more robust, complex approach to the videogame creative industries is needed; one that is able to account for how one of the most lucrative creative industries in the world is continuously produced, challenged, and reshaped by the work of amateurs, hobbyists, artists, and students. Through the lens of informal videogame development practices, this article has highlighted an alternative path for conceptualising the videogame industry and videogame development work. It has painted in broad strokes that themselves deserve much finer grained attention. The individual tools and communities mentioned here, along with the vast number of grassroots regional development scenes sprouting up beyond Japan, North America, and Western Europe (such as in Australia, South Africa, and the Netherlands) each deserve their own focused consideration that accounts for the regional and socio-economic specificities of informal development. Ultimately, this article has strived to lay the first stepping stones for creative industries researchers to more comprehensively ask (and answer): just who else makes videogames?
随着游戏机制造商的形式化束缚有所放松，视频游戏创意产业需要一种更强大、更复杂的方法；它能够解释世界上最赚钱的创意产业之一是如何通过业余爱好者、爱好者、艺术家和学生的工作不断产生、挑战和重塑的。通过非正式视频游戏开发实践的视角，本文强调了概念化视频游戏行业和视频游戏开发工作的另一种路径。它以粗略的笔触描绘出来，但它们本身值得更细粒度的关注。这里提到的各个工具和社区，以及日本、北美和西欧以外（例如澳大利亚、南非和荷兰）涌现的大量草根区域发展场景，都值得各自重点考虑，针对非正规发展的区域和社会经济特殊性。最终，本文力求为创意产业研究人员更全面地提出（并回答）问题奠定基础：还有谁制作视频游戏？