The second major constellation of this dissertation is the struggle between neoliberalism's transnational media corporations and the commons. Every major aspect of videogame culture, ranging from game design to audience reception, and from marketing to fan-created media, is a site of transnational contestation. Videogames are where many of the most important battles of the digital commons – who creates culture, who circulates it, who may access it and under what conditions, and whether it is the monopoly of the few or the democratic heritage of the many – are being fought.
One of the most striking signs of the power of the commons is the failure of in-game advertising campaigns or “advergaming” – the placement of ads inside game-worlds or videogames. To understand why this failure is so shocking, it is worth remembering that
advertising expenditure or “ad spend” is a key driver of most large-scale media industries.
Analyst firm ZenithOptimedia has estimated world ad spend at half a trillion dollars in 2010, which means advertising is an indispensable source of revenue for numerous media industries.53 Indeed, the past thirty years have witnessed the prodigious expansion of ad spend in every national media-system on the planet. The most extreme case is mainland China, where
advertising expenditure was almost nonexistent in 1979, but reached an estimated $74 billion by 2009.54
Yet videogames are in the unique position of being one of the few culture-industries to retain their financial and cultural autonomy vis-a-vis the advertising industry. Videogame industry revenues consist almost entirely of final sales to consumers. To this day, fans can spend countless hours in their favorite game-worlds, without being forced to watch a single ad or hear a single commercial jingle.
This is not because there are any significant technological or legislative barriers preventing advertisers from inserting advertisements into videogames. Indeed, the advertising industry has made repeated attempts to introduce advergaming since the early 1990s. One of the most famous attempts occurred in 2004, when executives of Massive, a firm specializing in advergaming, enthused about how an estimated $80 million market in 2004 would expand into a billion-dollar juggernaut by the end of the decade. In the ensuing market buzz, Massive's stock was purchased by Microsoft for somewhere between $200 million to $400 million.
The strategy failed, resulting in Microsoft's closure of Massive and a sizable loss on its original investment.55 Recently, an analyst for DFC Intelligence estimated total game-related advertising expenditure for the North American market at $1 billion in 2010 – a tiny fraction of
videogame sales ($25 billion) in this region. However, this figure consists primarily of traditional advertising, e.g. television ads for upcoming videogame releases. The DFC analyst was forced to conclude that the future was not in-game advertising, but “around-game” advertising.56
What stopped advergaming was an informal alliance of digital audiences, fan
communities and studio artists. On the most pragmatic level, consumers regard videogames as another form of recorded media. They would not tolerate advertisements popping up in the middle of their games, any more than they would tolerate prerecorded advertisements burned into the middle of the DVD or Bluray version of a purchased film.
More importantly, players spend significant amounts of time playing and replaying their favorite games, and interact extensively with communities of players online. While this aspect of videogame culture has received the most scholarly attention in the context of massive
multiplayer online games (MMOs), e.g. the work of Dmitri Williams, Nick Yee and others on commercial MMOs such as Everquest57, there is no question that contemporary videogame franchises are intensely social spaces. The experience of online multiplayer gaming and the proliferation of digital fan communities has enabled players to become deeply attached to their favorite online communities and game-worlds. While this attachment has similarities to the kind displayed by sports fans vis-a-vis their favorite teams, videogame fans have much greater structural power than their sports-based counterparts, for a number of reasons.
First, sports franchises rely heavily on broadcasting revenues generated by oligopolistic media markets, precisely where videogame franchises depend almost entirely on final sales to players. Second, only a tiny handful of athletes ever move from sandbox scrimmages to the world of professional athletics. By contrast, almost every videogame fan can become a
full-fledged player in their favorite game-world. Conversely, many videogame genres – this is especially true of action-based multiplayer games – are exciting to play, but excruciatingly dull to watch as spectators.
Third, the owners of professional sports franchises are accountable only to player unions comprised of hundreds of individuals, and to inchoate masses of fans who are not necessarily organized into pressure groups. By contrast, the owners and publishers of videogame franchises are accountable to millions of players who are already digitally organized, and retain the power to exit the franchise en masse, punishing unscrupulous studios or greedy publishers with bankruptcy.58
Interestingly, players have also rejected forms of advergaming which do not necessarily disrupt game-play – e.g. attempts to put ads onto “loading screens”, static displays which signal to the player that their console or digital device is busy loading data for the next game-play sequence. When advergaming firm Double Fusion attempted to plaster ads onto the loading screens of a Sony Playstation Network title called WipEoutHD [sic] in 2009, the result was intense player hostility. Thousands of enraged fans pointed out that the ads were not only
distracting and ludicrously irrelevant to the game-world, they damaged game-play by increasing the loading times of the game, and promptly posted online videos to prove their point. To its credit, Sony pulled the advertisements the very next day and vowed to abstain from any such advertising in the future – a promise it has kept.59
The fans' rejection of advergaming has been given tacit support by the vast majority of videogame artists and professional studios within the industry. From a game design perspective, in-game ads are much worse than a passing distraction. They can easily unravel the finely-crafted
balance of environments, pacing, and game-play which defines the game-world in question.
Nintendo has long followed a policy of excluding advertising completely from its videogames, which makes sense given its competitive roster of internal franchises, and its specialization in children's and teenage-oriented videogames. By contrast, Sony has permitted certain forms of advergaming, but only in the carefully monitored context of a few social gaming spaces within its Playstation Network platform. For example, there are commercial booths advertising specific games located inside Sony's online Home social gaming space, the PSN's version of an MMO which is open to any consumer with a Playstation Network account free of charge. However, there is no compulsory barrage of advertising comparable to what television viewers or theatrical movie-goers routinely face.
The failure of advergaming to become a dominant norm of the videogame industry highlights one of the central lessons of Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture. This is the fact that the commercial firms which dominate cultural production are locked into permanent contestation with their fans:
Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. Corporate convergence coexists with grassroots convergence. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets, and reinforce viewer commitments. Consumers are learning how to use these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with other consumers. The promises of this new media environment raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content. Inspired by those ideals, consumers are fighting for the right to participate more fully in their culture. Sometimes, corporate and grassroots convergence reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes, these two forces are at war and those struggles will redefine the face of American popular culture.60
We will argue that in the field of videogame culture, Jenkins' concluding thesis requires two additional qualifications. First, these struggles are not restricted to the domain of US popular
culture, but are transnational in scale and scope. Second, corporate convergence and grassroots convergence are in ceaseless and unremitting conflict. The reason is that the former is just another word for the commercial drive to extract maximum profits from any given media commodity, whereas the latter is fundamentally non-commercial in nature.
The space where these two opposing forces collide is the space of the videogame commons. It is where transnational audiences access the tools, skills and institutions of videogame culture – the space, in short, of videogame participation.61
One of the best examples of the power of this commons is the transformation of the videogame trailer or promotional footage. In the past, trailers provided short samples of game-play or cut-scenes, designed to be disgame-played to prospective publishers or else utilized in paid advertising campaigns. Thanks to the digital commons, however, the game trailer has become a transnational art-form.
While trailers do function as advertisements for the game in question, they differ from traditional paid advertising in two ways. First, they are released and viewed primarily as free downloads on the web, and only secondarily on commercial networks. Second, they are
increasingly produced with the direct participation of the videogame artists themselves, mostly because their narrative materials depend on in-game assets.
Both changes are the result of the videogame commons. The first change is due to the rise of free- to-view platforms such as YouTube, Youku and countless other sites. Instead of paying for expensive and limited air-time, studios could publish their trailers online, and allow fans, bloggers, and other digital communities to view the content for free. Because these trailers did not need to fit into thirty or sixty-second time slots, they could be longer and feature more
complex and challenging narratives than typical radio or television ads.
The second change was also triggered by the rise of the videogame commons. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for videogame ads to use simulated or mock game footage which had nothing to do the crude, blocky graphics of actual game-play. By the early 2000s, videogame players were able to quickly and easily post screenshots of simulated footage next to screen captures or other evidence of the actual game, triggering vitriolic denunciations by fans who felt betrayed by false advertising.62 As a result, today's trailers rely almost exclusively on in-game footage edited in creative ways, or else use live-action sequences which are clearly
differentiated from actual game-play. Some of these trailers are minor marvels of story-telling – most notably, the trailers for Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 4, which we will examine more closely in chapter 2.
Yet videogame trailers are just one of the innumerable forms of partly or completely non-commercial production, reception, and participation proliferating throughout the videogame commons. Listed below are some of the leading institutions and practices of this commons, listed next to their closest commercial analogue. Note that the dividing line between the commons and commerce is not always clear, and may vary between specific videogame genres and networks of non-commercial production:
Table 7. Role of the Videogame Commons vis-a-vis the Videogame Industry.
Category Non-Commercial Production
(Commons) Commercial Production
(Culture-Industry) Sound-track Open source media formats, editors,
players and distribution; community world market (rise of global English, but also media languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, etc.)
Editing/shot
technique Fan-created movies and other media;
videogame franchises are a potential engine of improvement rather than mediocrity; overlap with transnational animation/anime fan cultures
Motion-capture actors; cut-scenes
Game-play Expansion of digital social networks;
creation of game-based media begins to drive game production (e.g.
LittleBigPlanet); spread of fan art and fan fiction; fan-operated websites;
licensing strategies which respect rather than commodify fan and community labor
Easter eggs (free hidden content located inside commercial products); free downloadable demos; use of
downloadable add-ons to finance game development; displacement of paid advertising by game trailers and other free digital media broadband and digital mass media, most visible in Brazil, Russia, India, China)
Videogame industry depends on final consumer demand, not advertising (ads are less than 5% revenues); high-skill studio culture resists oligopolistic mediocrity; transnational talent pool
Before asking what new forms of collective creativity, cultural democratization, and transnational solidarity might be emerging from the videogame commons, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the relationship of the videogame commons to the larger category of the digital commons. In 2003, Yochai Benkler delivered one of the most influential accounts of the digital commons, in an essay which provided the basis for his 2006 text The Wealth of Networks.
Benkler insisted that non-commercial digital social networks are locked in structural contestation with commercial oligopolies:
But the democratic advantages, the individual freedom, and the growth through innovation that is made possible by the emergence of nonmarket and decentralized production will not emerge inexorably. The industrial giants that dominated information production and exchange in the twentieth century will not lightly relinquish their dominance. As we transition to a networked information economy, every point of control over the production and flow of information and culture becomes a point of conflict between the old, industrial model of production and the new distributed models. At the physical layer, ownership over wires and wireless licenses that are necessary to communicate provides a point of leverage for control. At the logical layer, necessary standards, protocols, and software – like operating systems – provide a point of control over the flow, and therefore the opportunities of production, of information and culture. At the content layer, intellectual property and business models that depend on tight control over existing information and culture – a central input into new creation – threaten to provide their owners with the ability to control who gets to say what to whom with the core cultural signifiers of out time.63
Just as what is perfectly rational for any individual firm (e.g. avoiding paying for carbon emissions) can be toxic to the society (e.g. the destructive effects of climate change), what is rational for any individual media corporation, i.e. profit maximization via oligopoly control, can be toxic to the interests of society as a whole.
Following Benkler's lead, the digital commons can be provisionally defined as the sum total of the non-commercial networks of production, distribution and consumption of digital media and information. Only a small part of these networks coincide with what media
corporations castigate as “piracy”, i.e. the unauthorized sale of commercial media. Rather, the
digital commons is characterized by diverse forms of exchange, some partly commodified and others wholly non-commercial in nature, which take place across a planetary array of
communities, markets and institutions.64
One of the reasons videogame culture is so dynamic is that it is structurally enmeshed in all three of Benkler's information layers, simultaneously – that is to say, the physical layer of hardware platforms, the coding layer of software, and the content layer of narrative and representation. These layers are more than just a site of specialized practices or technologies.
They are zones of contestation between transnational media corporations on the one hand, and digital creators, fans, and digital communities on the other. As a result, videogames openly register the clash between commercialism and the commons, in ways which have few parallels to the forms of non-commercial participation typical of previous forms of mass media.
During the heyday of analog television broadcasting, for example, commercial
oligopolies (in the case of CBS, NBC and ABC in the US, or Globo in Brazil) or oligarchic state authorities (in the case of the Soviet Union and Maoist-era China) controlled everything from the technical specifications of television sets to the occupational specializations of film studios.
Individual directors had limited power to challenge Hollywood studio bosses or their Soviet counterparts. Similarly, during the 1970s, television audiences could register their preferences only through a narrow slice of Benkler's content layer – i.e. through consumer purchases or viewer ratings.
By contrast, every layer of videogame design is enmeshed in some form of democratic contestation. The hardware layer has been democratized by the need of gaming platforms to be accessible to the largest number of consumers and to the widest pool of game developers
possible. The software layer has been democratized by the power and productivity of open source software tools, as well as the need for a highly-trained, culturally literate workforce to build and test game code. Finally, the content layer has been democratized by the expansion of the digital audience from roughly 350 million consumers in the mid-1990s to 2 billion by 2010, not to mention the multiple media booms of the industrializing nations.
The response of Sony's Santa Monica Studio, creators of the God of War franchise, to this democratization is paradigmatic in this regard. The onerous demands of the physical layer
(everything from multicore programming for the Playstation 3 system, to effective use of Sony's game controllers) meant that the design team had to collaborate with a vast network of other Sony studios and first-party partners all across the world.65 In the software realm, the Santa Monica team relied, like all videogame studios nowadays, on inputs of open source software as well as forms of egalitarian teamwork with literally hundreds of other skilled culture-workers.66 As far as the content layer is concerned, the Santa Monica studio took care to evolve the franchise over time in close collaboration with the fan community. Many studio artists
encouraged fan media and user-generated content, as well as offering a variety of free media and low-cost downloadable content. For example, Sony Santa Monica artist Andy Park began posting samples of his God of War artwork on a fansite as early as 2007. In Park's words:
I've been wanting to post more of my artwork here for awhile but most of my work I've been doing for the past 2 years is held up in NDAs [non-disclosure agreements]. I've been busy
working on the upcoming PS3 game, God of War III. I can't show any of that stuff yet but here's a bunch of images I can show as a follow up to my initial posting of God of War II stuff.
Park's entry is followed by a series of samples of “concept art”, pictures which provide an aesthetic reference point for the work of the game programmers and designers. There are no
anti-copying restrictions or other limits on anti-copying these image files, i.e. Park is openly encouraging fans to download the concept art and disseminate it further.67
anti-copying restrictions or other limits on anti-copying these image files, i.e. Park is openly encouraging fans to download the concept art and disseminate it further.67