Fractured Imaginaries - an Ethnography of Game Design

This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of how the everyday practices of video game development are shaped by the ways in which game developers socially imagine themselves, their game, and their prospective players. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Southern Californian game development studio among the makers of a high-budget, online shooter game, I investigate how game design practices emerge from a particularly situated studio environment and the shared imagining of their future game. As cultural and industry terrains inevitably shift over time, design practices reflect the changing, sometimes conflicting, cultural narratives. The imaginings of future players, player agencies, game systems, and development colleagues are all shaped by, and help to reproduce, the narratives that describe how developer and player subjectivities are embedded within the confluences of the design studio, the translocal influences of game industry and gamer culture, and the technosocial assemblages of online games. Starting with an outline of the historical context of this one studio, team, and game, I investigate the game studio as both a financial entity and culturally idealized creative space. An ethnographic portrait of the studio’s physical and digital exposes the enactment of certain organizational values through spatial arrangements. The particularities of design practice are seen to emerge from a professional-social environment that requires the persistent interpretation of disparate professional visions and narratives across a large development team. Game designers are seen to co-construct shared imaginings of design ideas, development tasks, and potential player experiences through an exchange of narratives that leverage the team’s cultural touchstones. These recursive patterns of social imagining are highlighted by game designers’ deep sense of personally affiliation with the same gamer cultural groups as their anticipated players. As a form of technology production, game design provides an enlightening example of how a group of developers must pull together a multitude of different imaginings into conjunction with complex, technological systems to create—or attempt to create—a new, coherent, technosocial product