The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist by Brendan Keogh

Discussing the “videogame industry” can be daunting for scholars, teachers, and practitioners alike. Yet as Brendan Keogh reminds us, the sheer size and value of digital games necessitate wading into the subject. The “industry” often has a personal impact. Pain from massive layoffs, successes in unionizing, and discussions about what game developers look like are constant themes in heartfelt social media posts.

In The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist, Keogh takes a deeply human stance, emphasizing that gamemakers struggle for legitimacy and position within a broader field “in which cultural, social, and economic values flow” (7) informed by criteria such as local geographies, education, and working conditions. In doing so, he shifts views on videogame production from that of a monolithic “industry” to a diverse set of practices and circumstances driven by creative workers adapting and resisting systems of power that exploit their efforts.

Personal perspectives permeate all parts of the book. As Keogh describes in detail (chapter 2), the wake of recent closures permanently reshaped Australian studios’ size, scope, and output, influencing him as both a designer and an academic. To understand the field of videogame production, he draws directly from those similarly affected, interviewing 205 gamemakers, surveying 288 more, and conducting fieldwork at local conferences.

Personal stories and quotes are threaded throughout the manuscript as Keogh lays out his key arguments. After an introduction that includes methods and terms, the first chapter, “From Videogame Industry to Videogame Fields,” lucidly explains the core components of Pierre Bourdieu’s “field theory,” including symbolic capital, autonomy, position, disposition, and position-taking.¹ Keogh uses these concepts to highlight the current state of “in/formalization” (36) in games where recent changes destabilize and blur makers’ positions within the field, demonstrated by participants’ ambivalent answers to simple questions such as whether they identify as “professional” developers.

Historical context follows in the second chapter, “Videogame Production in Australia,” where Keogh details how big companies exploit and abandon game workers while independent studios grow in parallel, leading to in/formalization of the lines between hobbyists and professionals (72). “Getting By in the Videogame Gig Economy” shifts focus to in/formalized labor, emphasizing a “creativity dispositif” that romanticizes “precarity, individualizes struggle, and depoliticizes the site of work” (83). Interviewees elucidate how power struggles stemming from work conditions with the field’s dominant actors manifest in their daily lives.

The next two chapters concentrate more on how gamemakers enter and relate to gamemaking. In “Enrolling Students into the Field,” a chapter that will resonate with those teaching gaming courses, classrooms are shown to be critical sites for developing an entrepreneurial mindset, with most schools legitimizing a supposed “pipeline” into studios that cannot accommodate the flood of skilled students produced. Instead, graduates often assume other endeavors. As revealed in “Embedded Gaming Skills,” they balance autonomy as developers with the need for more consistent work, exemplified in studios such as Chaos Theory Games, which produces games, augmented reality apps, and commercial content for clients such as the M&Ms candy company (137).

The last two chapters consider the geography within which the field persists. “Scenes and Communities” compares gamemaking to other arts “scenes” confronted by local or translocal struggles, interlopers, and claims to authenticity. “From Videogame Field to Videogame Industries” telescopes out to relay how businesses tap the resources and “surplus cultural value” (187) of smaller community efforts through distribution services (e.g., Steam), engines (e.g., Unity), and even specific titles (e.g., Roblox). However, Keogh ends positively, asserting that collective action can occur at the periphery by organizations such as Game Workers Unite. The conclusion nicely summarizes and considers the limitations and potential for future work.

While building from game production research, significant studies about the lives of game workers are few and far between, though several titles reflect some of these nuances.² Keogh’s book fits nicely in this arena, leaning on individual stories to bring a broader perspective to gaming as a cultural production.

What sets Keogh’s book apart is the seamless incorporation of theoretical, cultural, communications, and media concerns. He expands upon inherent game production issues by bringing them to light in broader conversations. For example, in discussing Bourdieu’s idea that there are “perpetual struggles in various cultural fields over authenticity,” Keogh underscores disputes about new gaming “communities and tools” and what “constitutes a ‘real’ videogame” (23). However, in the same paragraph, he ties these struggles to “debates in popular music scenes as to who is an authentic member of a particular subculture and who is a sellout” (23). This approach allows for multiple ways to apprehend the theory. It illustrates how broader issues of power and sociology, in which Bourdieu is so heavily embedded, can pertain to and beyond games.

In fact, games are often the canary in the coal mine for other media industries, whether considering innovations, business models, labor practices, or popular culture.³ Keogh successfully shows throughout the book how this is the case. The adoption of digital media is compared between gaming and music (30); players’ unpaid labor is tied to other platform providers (192); even game producers’ identities as “employee, entrepreneur, and artist” (130) apply to any aspiring media maker. Therefore, Keogh’s work shows that working conditions, contemporary capitalist structures, educational shortcomings, and local scenes are all relevant beyond gaming; the field constantly abuts and mirrors others—from big tech to journalism.

Combined with personal narratives, this approach enables Keogh to effectively point out how contemporary forms of cultural production impact workers in often imperceptible ways. He quotes a gamemaker who uses Marx’s “means of production” to explain why they were exhausted and upset about “not being able to say yes to go to a friend’s wedding or not being able to save money” (85) to buy a house. These stories can add a valuable foundation for other work on labor. For instance, I have written about a “playbour production system” where player passion is built into workflows and tools.⁴ I was struck by how respondents’ comments help illuminate the experience of existing within such structures.

As expansive as his study may be, Keogh acknowledges that it cannot cover everything. He notes the absence of studying intermediaries (e.g., journalists) and players, as well as the focus on only one English-speaking country, among other subjects (217). However, what emerges from The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist is a theoretically rich yet deeply personal examination of the disparate choices gamemakers make to survive in an increasingly complicated field. Ultimately, the book imparts a clear-eyed vision of what, how, and where games are made in the 2020s.