Workflow: Unity’s Coordination of Individualized Labour Processes

Abstract

This chapter considers how cultural software situate and mediate the labour processes and skills of their users. Unity, the chapter argues, positions itself as a metaplatform for the coordination of workflows that are intensely individualized and distributed across multiple software environments. The chapter begins with a close analysis of Unity’s software environment and a consideration of how it encourages a ‘component-oriented’ approach to design. It then considers how this approach redirects the videogame development pipeline, decentring the role of the programmer in the videogame development team. Rather than simply ‘empowering’ non-programmers, however, the final section considers how Unity’s coordination of workflows requires developers to streamline, coordinate, and individualize their own labour processes, thus contributing to a broader reimaging of creative work under capitalism.