Abstract
This chapter considers the different ways that audiences invest meanings in a cultural software. Inherent in any of these understandings of the role and mediations of a cultural software are assumptions as to just which skills, knowledges, and aesthetic decisions are fundamental to the process of creating works within any given medium. This chapter thus considers the literacies that mediate the perceptions of three different groups towards Unity: videogame developers, tertiary students and educators, and the enthusiast videogame press. Through an overview of these varied perspectives of what it means to use Unity, this chapter provides ways of considering how different literacies influence different understandings, positive and negative, of the role of a cultural software within a cultural field and within society more broadly.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Banks (2013) for a case study of the ‘incentives’ that existed for Australian videogame companies to build custom tools in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Banks offers a detailed ANT-inspired account of the Brisbane-based studio Auran (now N3V Games) from 1998 to 2000, when the company was investing a huge amount of resources in the development of a proprietary engine known as SAGE, later renamed Jet. The engine was to be utilized not only for in-house development purposes, but also as a means of attracting external licensees. Interestingly, Banks (2013: 51) observes that Auran set itself the impossible task of developing an engine that could ‘do everything’, which, according to one of his interviewees, was ‘all about marketing [and] hype’. This speaks to the long-standing fantasy of a universal game engine, discussed in Chapter 2.
- 2.
A representative of a technical college in the Netherlands, who was interviewed for an adjacent project by the authors, discussed taking the opposite approach. They had renamed their degree from ‘videogame development’ to ‘Unity development’. While the degree program still largely focused on videogame development skills, the school representative we spoke to noted that they had identified more extensive employment opportunities for Unity developers, beyond the videogame industry. According to them, other industries, including mining, advertising, the military, and freight shipping, were increasingly looking for developers specifically skilled in Unity. There are some statistics to back up this claim, such as Linkedin’s 2017 ‘U.S. Emerging Jobs Report’, which situates ‘Unity developer’ as the 7th most in-demand job title among US employers (Economic Graph Team 2017).
- 3.
See Harvey (2014: 100) for a discussion of this issue in relation to ‘the legitimacy of twine games’ created primarily by LGBTIQA+ videogame-makers.
References
Arsenault, Dominic. 2017. Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Banks, John. 2013. Co-creating Videogames. New York: Bloomsbury.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983. “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed”. Poetics 12: 311–356.
Bridgstock, Ruth, and Stuart Cunningham. 2016. “Creative Labour and Graduate Outcomes: Implications for Higher Education and Cultural Policy.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 22 (1): 10–26.
Clays, Simon. 1997. “Return of the Vampire!” Nintendo Official Magazine 57: 4–5.
Cote, Amanda C. 2018. “Writing ‘Gamers’: The Gendered Construction of Gamer Identity in Nintendo Power (1994–1999).” Games and Culture 13 (5): 479–503.
Deterding, Sebastian, and Casey O’Donnell. 2016. “Game Engines in Game Education: Thinking Inside the Toolbox?” GDC Vault. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023034/Game-Engines-in-Game-Education.
Economic Graph Team. 2017. “LinkedIn’s 2017 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report.” Linkedin, December 7. https://economicgraph.linkedin.com/research/LinkedIns-2017-US-Emerging-Jobs-Report.
Freedman, Eric. 2018. “Engineering Queerness in the Game Development Pipeline.” Game Studies 18 (3). http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/ericfreedman.
Harvey, Alison. 2014. “Twine’ Revolution: Democratization, Depoliticization, and the Queering of Game Design.” Game 3: 95–107.
Harvey, Alison. 2019. “Becoming Gamesworkers: Diversity, Higher Education, and the Future of the Game Industry.” Television & New Media (OnlineFirst): 1–11.
Hecker, Chris. 2013. “Fair Use.” Youtube, March 29. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXnoW2SvQrQ.
Keighley, Geoff. 2014. “The Final Hours of Titanfall.” http://www.finalhoursoftitanfall.com/.
Keogh, Brendan. 2019. “From Aggressively Formalised to Intensely In/Formalised: Accounting for a Wider Range of Videogame Development Practices.” Creative Industries Journal 12 (1): 14–33.
Kirkpatrick, Graeme. 2013. Computer Games and the Social Imaginary. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kirkpatrick, Graeme. 2015. The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981–1995. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
kopas, merritt. 2015. Videogames for Humans: Twine Authors in Conversation. New York: Instar Books.
McRobbie, Angela. 2016. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nicoll, Benjamin. 2019 (forthcoming). Minor Platforms in Videogame History. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
Oakley, Kate. 2014. “Good Work? Rethinking Cultural Entrepreneurship.” In Handbook of Management and Creativity, edited by Chris Bilton and Stephen Cummings, 145–159. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Shaw, Adrienne. 2012. “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity.” New Media Society 14 (1): 28–44.
Shaw, Adrienne, and Shira Chess. 2015. “Reflections on the Casual Games Market in a Post-GamerGate World.” In Social, Casual, and Mobile Videogames: The Changing Gaming Landscape, edited by Tama Leaver and Michele Wilson, 277–289. New York: Bloomsbury.
Therrien, Carl, and Martin Picard. 2016. “Enter the Bit Wars: A Study of Video Game Marketing and Platform Crafting in the Wake of the TurboGrafx-16 Launch.” New Media & Society 18 (10): 2323–2339.
UNESCO. 2006. Education for All Global Monitoring Report: Literacy for Life. Paris: United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Vanderhoef, John. 2019 (forthcoming). Passion, Pixels, and Profit: The New Creative Economy of Indie Game Production. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Warner, John. 2018. “It’s Time We Stopped Encouraging Indies.” Gamesindustry.biz, October 2. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-02-its-time-we-stopped-encouraging-indies.
Wright, Steven. 2018. “There Are Too Many Video Games. What Now?” Polygon, September 28. https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-many-video-games-what-now-indiepocalypse.
Yang, Robert. 2018. “What Is the Game University For?” Radiator, May 4. https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2018/05/what-is-game-university-for.html.
Young, Christopher J. 2018. “Game Changers: Everyday Gamemakers and the Development of the Video Game Industry.” PhD diss., University of Toronto.
Zagal, José P., and Amy Bruckman. 2008. “Novices, Gamers, and Scholars: Exploring the Challenges of Teaching About Games.” Game Studies 8 (2).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nicoll, B., Keogh, B. (2019). Literacy: Articulations of Unity Across Development, Education, and Enthusiast Contexts. In: The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25012-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25012-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25011-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25012-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)