Commercial video game studios erect boundaries through the organization of work that tends to discourage the production of a diverse range of games. This article adds to the scholarship on the production of video games by examining gender and other boundaries in the way work is organized at a U.S. commercial studio. Video games are a result of social conditions in a distinct organizational culture. Changing these conditions to allow for gender and other types of diverse organizational structures can impact the role of video games for the broader culture. The organization of work was analyzed through teamwork and the physical layout of the office space in relation to external customer relations and internal departmental organization. Additionally, the article examines how gender is engaged within these organizational dynamics. These factors contribute to an environment that enables game employees with a certain disposition to affectively invest in boundary maintenance.
AarsethE. (2006). The culture and business of cross-media productions. Popular Communication, 4, 203–211.
2.
BanksJ.HumphreysS. (2008). The labour of user co-creators: Emergence social network markets?Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14, 401–418.
3.
BourdieuP. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (NiceR., Trans.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1972)
4.
BourdieuP. (1989). Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory, 7, 14–25.
5.
BourdieuP. (1991). Language and symbolic power (RaymondG.AdamsonM., Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
6.
BourdieuP. (1998). On television (Parkhurst FergusonP., Trans.). New York, NY: The New Press.
7.
BourdieuP. (2005). The political field, the social science field, and the journalistic field. In BensonR.NeveuE. (Eds.), Bourdieu and the journalistic field (pp. 29–47). Malden, MA: Polity Press.
8.
BourdieuP.WacquantL. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
9.
ColemanS.Dyer-WithefordN. (2007). Playing on the digital commons. Media, Culture & Society, 29, 934–953.
10.
ConsalvoM. (2006). Console video games and global corporations: Creating a hybrid culture. New Media & Society, 8, 117–137.
11.
DeanJ. (2002). Publicity’s secret: How technoculture capitalizes on democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
12.
DenzinN. K.LincolnY. S. (2005). The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In DenzinN.LincolnY. (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
13.
DeuzeM. (2007). Media work. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.
14.
DeuzeM.MartinC. B.AllenC. (2007). The professional identity of gameworkers. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 13, 335–353.
15.
DoveyJ.KennedyH. (2006). Game cultures: Computer games as new media. Berkshire, England: Open University Press.
16.
Dyer-WithefordN.de PeuterG. (2006). “EA Spouse” and the crisis of video game labour: Enjoyment, exclusion, exploitation, exodus. Canadian Journal of Communication, 31, 599–617.
17.
Dyer-WithefordN.SharmanZ. (2005). The political economy of Canada’s video and computer game industry. Canadian Journal of Communication, 30, 187–210.
18.
EisenhardtK. M. (1989). Building theory from case study research. The Academy of Management Review, 14, 532–550.
19.
FoucaultM. (1984). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In RabinowP. (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 76–100). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
20.
GoughB.EdwardsG. (1998). The beer talking: Four lads, a carry out and the reproduction of masculinities. The Sociological Review, 46, 409–435.
21.
HallS. (2006). Encoding/decoding. In DurhamM.KellnerD. (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 163–173). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
IpB. (2008). Technological, content and market convergence in the games industry. Games and Culture, 3, 199–224.
25.
JenkinsH. (2006) Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York, NY: New York University Press.
26.
JöckelS.WillA.SchwarzerF. (2008). Participatory media culture and digital online distribution—Reconfiguring the value chain in the computer game industry. International Journal on Media Management, 10, 102–111
27.
KafaiY.HeeterC.DennerJ.SunJ. (2008). Preface: Pink, purple, casual, or mainstream games: Moving beyond the gender divide. In KafaiY. B.HeeterC.DennerJ.SunJ. Y. (Eds.), Beyond Barbie and mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming (pp. xi–xxv). Cambridge, England: MIT Press.
28.
KerrA. (2006). The business and culture of digital games: Gamework/gameplay. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
29.
KlineS.Dyer-WithefordN.de PeuterG. (2003). Digital play: The interaction of technology, culture and marketing. Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
30.
LatourB. (1999). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
31.
LiuA. (2004). The laws of cool: Knowledge work and the culture of information. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
32.
MartinC. B.DeuzeM. (2009). The independent production of culture: A digital games case study. Games and Culture, 4, 276–295.
33.
O’DonnellC. (2011). The Nintendo entertainment system and the 10NES chip: Carving the video game industry in silicon. Games and Culture, 6, 83–100.
34.
PittL. (1993). Masculinities@work: Gender inequality and the new media industries. Feminist Media Studies, 3, 378–382.
35.
PotterJ. W. (1996). An analysis of thinking and research about qualitative methods. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
36.
PrattA. C.GillR.SpelthannV. (2007). Work and the city in the e-society: A critical investigation of the sociospatially situated character of economic production in the digital content industries in the UK. Information, Communication & Society, 10, 922–942.
37.
PrescottJ.BoggJ. (2011a). Segregation in a male-dominated industry: Women working in the computer games industry. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 3, 206–227.
38.
PrescottJ.BoggJ. (2011b). Career attitudes of men and women working in the computer games industry. Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 5, 7–28.
39.
RakowL. F. (1988). Gendered technology, gendered practice. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5, 57–71.
40.
StoneA. R. (1995). The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
41.
SwartzD. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
42.
TerranovaT. (2004). Network culture: Politics for the information age. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.
43.
ThornhamH. (2008). “It’s a boy thing”: Gaming, gender and geeks. Feminist Media Studies, 8, 127–147.
44.
TschangF. T. (2007). Balancing the tensions between rationalization and creativity in the video games industry. Organization Science, 18, 989–1005.
45.
TuchmanG. (1983). Consciousness industries and the production of culture. Journal of Communication, 33, 330–341.
46.
WajcmanJ. (1991). Feminism confronts technology. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
47.
WilliamsD.YeeN.CaplanS. (2008). Who plays, how much and why? Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, 993–1018.
48.
WolcottH. F. (1994). Transforming qualitative data: Description, analysis, and interpretation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
