Independent Videogames

Dr. Paolo Ruffino is lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths and MIT Press, 2018). He has co-curated, with Marco Benoît Carbone, a special issue of Games and Culture in 2017 on the work of Roger Caillois, and of GAME The Italian Journal of Game Studies on videogame subcultures in 2014. His research focuses on independent videogame development, the automation of play, and contemporary practices and technologies of gamification and quantification of the self. He is chair of DiGRA Italia and a member of British DiGRA.

1. Introduction: After Independence Part I: Cultures 2. Decoding and Recoding Game Jams and Independent Game-making Spaces for Diversity and Inclusion 3. Queering Indie: How LGBTQ Experiences Challenge Dominant Narratives of Independent Games 4. Virtually Indie: On the Characteristics of Independent Game Development for Virtual Reality Headsets Part II: Networks 5. Network or Die? What Social Networking Analysis Can Tell Us About Indie Game Development 6. Strange Bedfellows: Indie Games and Academia Part III: Techniques 7. The Conditions of Videogame Production: The Nature and Stakes of Creative Freedom in Stiegler’s Philosophy of Technicity 8. Boutique Indie: Annapurna Interactive and Contemporary Independent Game Development 9. Game Production Studies: Studio Studies Theory, Method and Practice Part IV: Politics 10. Game Workers Unite: Unionization Among Independent Developers 11. Playing with Risk: Political-Economy, Independent Games, and the Precarity of Development in Crowded Commercial Markets Part V: Local Indie Game Studies 12. Playful Peripheries: The Consolidation of Independent Game Production in Latin America 13. The Melbourne Indie Game Scenes: Value Regimes in Localized Game Development 14. Modes of Independence in the Finnish Game Development Scene 15. The Rebels Across the Street: IndiE3 and the Strategic Geography of Indie Game Promotion 16. Freedom from the Industry Standard: Student Working Imaginaries and Independence in Games Higher Education 17. Afterword: The Cultural Conditions of Being Indie