App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store
To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the co... more To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.
This commentary discusses the political economy of apps. The authors found that Canadian-made gam... more This commentary discusses the political economy of apps. The authors found that Canadian-made game apps are notably absent in the Canadian App Store. This should be both worrying and surprising, as Canada has a relatively sizable game industry. While policy conversations on digital transformation focus on emerging technology, the authors point toward the power and politics of digital platforms as one of the key issues preventing growth in the Canadian digital economy.
A gulf habitually seems to separate single-player games from multiplayer games. From the start sc... more A gulf habitually seems to separate single-player games from multiplayer games. From the start screen of a huge swath of games, the two paths diverge. In the first, a single-player campaign laden with narrative components unfolds. In the second, gameplay hinges on the actions of other players, whether oppositional combat in a fighting game, or cooperatively as in some sports titles. This perceived split manifests in a variety of historical and contextual forms: it emerges from the single-player games of the frenetic, quarter-driven arcades against the social play style dominant in early generations of home consoles; or, likewise, from the solitary, single-player journeys of role-playing games (RPGs) played in suburban dens to sprawling virtual communities of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). It often pops up in the interstices between the two, as in the local area network (LAN) party, alternating or asynchronous play, or local cooperative play. Without a doubt, understandings of single-player/multi-player entangle both the context of play and type of game. Approaches in game studies are not immune to the fracturing divide of single/multi, often bracketing off online experiences in studies of community, leaving design, nar-ratological, and philosophical concerns in the single-player realm. Several questions arise from the slash of single/multi: what are, both material and cultural, the historic conditions that facilitate the rift? How do different schools in the loosely-affiliated field of game studies cultivate, approach, and defy the fracture? How do bounds of platforms, player action, methodology, economic, and marketing interests all shape the senses of single-player and multiplayer experiences? Moreover, if a great deal of what separates the two collapses, then what binds the two and how should we account for the multi-faceted material, discursive, and cultural assemblage of single/multi?
This article is a chronicle and analysis of a community crisis in digital space that took place o... more This article is a chronicle and analysis of a community crisis in digital space that took place on Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform, Steam. When Valve and Bethesda (publisher and developer of Skyrim) decided to allow mods to be sold by mod makers themselves, there ensued a community revolt against the commodifi-cation of leisure and play. I put this crisis of play and work in dialogue with Harvey's concept of " accumulation by dispossession, " firmly placing it within a longer history of disruptive capital accumulation strategies. I then conduct a discourse analysis of community members on reddit, as they make sense of and come to terms with this process of dispossession. Arising in the discourse was not class consciousness per se, but instead a pervasive feeling of helplessness and frustration as games, play, and leisure began to feel like work.
This article brings distinct strands of the political economy of communication and economic geogr... more This article brings distinct strands of the political economy of communication and economic geography together in order to theorise the role digital technologies play in Marxian crisis theory. Capitalist advances into digital spaces do not make the law of value obsolete, but these spaces do offer new methods for displacing overaccumulated capital, increasing consumption, or accumulating new, cheaper labour. We build on David Harvey's theory of the spatial fix to describe three digital spatial fixes, fixed capital projects that use the specific properties of digital spaces to increase the rate of profit , before themselves becoming obstacles to the addictive cycle of accumulation: the primitive accumulation of time in the social Web, the annihilation of time by space in high-frequency trading, and affect rent in virtual worlds. We conclude by reflecting on how these digital spatial fixes also fix the tempo of accumulation and adjust the timescale of Marxian crisis theory.
This article seeks to develop an approach to independent video game production through a synthesi... more This article seeks to develop an approach to independent video game production through a synthesis of recent work in assemblage theory and critical political economy. As an alternative to the (still important and useful) institutionalist political economic work of Kerr (2006) or Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter's immaterial-labour oriented study in Games of Empire (2009), I propose studying videogames through their historically and materially specific context, thinking about videogame development communities as assemblages (DeLanda, 2006). Both approaches have the tendency to reduce videogames – in the former to the institutional character of the organization, and in the latter to an overdetermination of discourses and material in global flows of capital. The assemblage of videogame production should not be conceptualized as an object overdetermined by global capital's immanence towards new forms of immaterial labour. Rather it is negotiating its way through capital, state bureaucracies, aesthetics, ad hoc decision making and the flows of bodies through urban spaces. The work of videogame production is both immaterial and expressive, as much as it is firmly grounded in existing material relationships to a panoply of objects. This paper then has two goals: 1) to illustrate an ontology and method of political economy and 2) contribute to the growing scholarship on indie games.
App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store
To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the co... more To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada’s vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.
This commentary discusses the political economy of apps. The authors found that Canadian-made gam... more This commentary discusses the political economy of apps. The authors found that Canadian-made game apps are notably absent in the Canadian App Store. This should be both worrying and surprising, as Canada has a relatively sizable game industry. While policy conversations on digital transformation focus on emerging technology, the authors point toward the power and politics of digital platforms as one of the key issues preventing growth in the Canadian digital economy.
A gulf habitually seems to separate single-player games from multiplayer games. From the start sc... more A gulf habitually seems to separate single-player games from multiplayer games. From the start screen of a huge swath of games, the two paths diverge. In the first, a single-player campaign laden with narrative components unfolds. In the second, gameplay hinges on the actions of other players, whether oppositional combat in a fighting game, or cooperatively as in some sports titles. This perceived split manifests in a variety of historical and contextual forms: it emerges from the single-player games of the frenetic, quarter-driven arcades against the social play style dominant in early generations of home consoles; or, likewise, from the solitary, single-player journeys of role-playing games (RPGs) played in suburban dens to sprawling virtual communities of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). It often pops up in the interstices between the two, as in the local area network (LAN) party, alternating or asynchronous play, or local cooperative play. Without a doubt, understandings of single-player/multi-player entangle both the context of play and type of game. Approaches in game studies are not immune to the fracturing divide of single/multi, often bracketing off online experiences in studies of community, leaving design, nar-ratological, and philosophical concerns in the single-player realm. Several questions arise from the slash of single/multi: what are, both material and cultural, the historic conditions that facilitate the rift? How do different schools in the loosely-affiliated field of game studies cultivate, approach, and defy the fracture? How do bounds of platforms, player action, methodology, economic, and marketing interests all shape the senses of single-player and multiplayer experiences? Moreover, if a great deal of what separates the two collapses, then what binds the two and how should we account for the multi-faceted material, discursive, and cultural assemblage of single/multi?
This article is a chronicle and analysis of a community crisis in digital space that took place o... more This article is a chronicle and analysis of a community crisis in digital space that took place on Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform, Steam. When Valve and Bethesda (publisher and developer of Skyrim) decided to allow mods to be sold by mod makers themselves, there ensued a community revolt against the commodifi-cation of leisure and play. I put this crisis of play and work in dialogue with Harvey's concept of " accumulation by dispossession, " firmly placing it within a longer history of disruptive capital accumulation strategies. I then conduct a discourse analysis of community members on reddit, as they make sense of and come to terms with this process of dispossession. Arising in the discourse was not class consciousness per se, but instead a pervasive feeling of helplessness and frustration as games, play, and leisure began to feel like work.
This article brings distinct strands of the political economy of communication and economic geogr... more This article brings distinct strands of the political economy of communication and economic geography together in order to theorise the role digital technologies play in Marxian crisis theory. Capitalist advances into digital spaces do not make the law of value obsolete, but these spaces do offer new methods for displacing overaccumulated capital, increasing consumption, or accumulating new, cheaper labour. We build on David Harvey's theory of the spatial fix to describe three digital spatial fixes, fixed capital projects that use the specific properties of digital spaces to increase the rate of profit , before themselves becoming obstacles to the addictive cycle of accumulation: the primitive accumulation of time in the social Web, the annihilation of time by space in high-frequency trading, and affect rent in virtual worlds. We conclude by reflecting on how these digital spatial fixes also fix the tempo of accumulation and adjust the timescale of Marxian crisis theory.
This article seeks to develop an approach to independent video game production through a synthesi... more This article seeks to develop an approach to independent video game production through a synthesis of recent work in assemblage theory and critical political economy. As an alternative to the (still important and useful) institutionalist political economic work of Kerr (2006) or Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter's immaterial-labour oriented study in Games of Empire (2009), I propose studying videogames through their historically and materially specific context, thinking about videogame development communities as assemblages (DeLanda, 2006). Both approaches have the tendency to reduce videogames – in the former to the institutional character of the organization, and in the latter to an overdetermination of discourses and material in global flows of capital. The assemblage of videogame production should not be conceptualized as an object overdetermined by global capital's immanence towards new forms of immaterial labour. Rather it is negotiating its way through capital, state bureaucracies, aesthetics, ad hoc decision making and the flows of bodies through urban spaces. The work of videogame production is both immaterial and expressive, as much as it is firmly grounded in existing material relationships to a panoply of objects. This paper then has two goals: 1) to illustrate an ontology and method of political economy and 2) contribute to the growing scholarship on indie games.
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