Masters thesis of design small team game making in australia a case study of goati entertainment

I explored how they grappled with precarious working conditions, how they engaged with emerging technologies such as blockchain to keep their doors open, dynamically responded to shifts

Small Team Game Making in Australia: A Case Study of GOATi Entertainment

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design

Maximilian John Myers

Bachelors of Design (Games) – RMIT Bachelor of Arts Honours (Games Art and Design) – Murdoch University

School of Design

College of Design and Social Context

RMIT University

August 2022

I

Declaration

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, this research is that of the author alone; the content of this research submission is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed

In addition, I certify that this submission contains no material previously submitted for award

of any qualification at any other university or institution, unless approved for a joint-award with another institution, and acknowledge that no part of this work will, in the future, be used

in a submission in my name, for any other qualification in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of the University, and where applicable, any partner institution responsible for the joint-award of this degree

I acknowledge that copyright of any published works contained within this thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of those works

I give permission for the digital version of my research submission to be made available on the web, via the University’s digital research repository, unless permission has been granted

by the University to restrict access for a period of time

I acknowledge the support I have received for my research through the provision of an

Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship

Maximilian John Myers 31st August 2022

of thanks– so to all the people who I knew in the years I was writing this document, who touched it in some small way, thank you – I really could not have done it without you all

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Contents

Declaration I Acknowledgements II

Abstract 1

1 Introduction 3

Project aims 4

Structure of this thesis 7

2 Literature review 9

Games Production Studies 10

Following studios 12

Co-creative practices 14

Monetisation 16

Precarious work 18

Esports 19

Chapter Summary 21

3 Methods 23

4 Precarity and labour 36

Precariousness 38

Grappling with precarity 42

Precarious independence 43

Creating stability 46

The hustle 50

Not just making games 56

Hustle and crunch 59

Chapter Summary 61

5 Blockchain and boundary objects 63

Blockchain 64

What is blockchain? 67

GOATi and Blockchain 69

Moving into Blockchain 71

Working amidst backlash 73

Boundary objects 78

Chapter Summary 85

6 Conclusion 87

References 90

Appendices 97

Appendix A: 22nd Racing Series 97

Appendix B: Pavillion Hub 98

IV

Appendix C: Ethics Approval 100

V

Figures

Figure 2: Pavillion Hub 3

Figure 1: 22nd Racing Series 3

Figure 3: Engagement Timeline 25

Figure 4: Booth at Pax Australia 2019 25

Figure 5: Pax Aus 2019 booth setup – Garth & Fotini 27

Figure 6: MyDriveSchool in game 47

Figure 7: Gaming page on Phantasmas website 47

Figure 8: GOATi simulation 48

Figure 9: REVGEN explainer 48

Figure 10: 22nd Racing Series Website 49

Figure 12: 22nd Racing Series pre-sale NFT splash page 65

Figure 13 Tweet response from an Australian developer to the Voxel Agents announcement of Gardens Between coming to Pavillion Hub 74

Figure 14: 22nd Racing Series 97

Figure 15: Pavillion store page 2/3/2022 98

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Abstract

This study follows the Melbourne-based development studio Greatest Of All Time Interactive Entertainment (GOATi) from 2019 to 2020 through a period of change within the studio, industry, and wider cultural context It details how GOATi was able to move from precarity

to stability – and the specific context, scale, economic situation and labour required to create this stability During this period, I volunteered with GOATi for a total of six months and engaged in interviews after this time I followed the core team members as they developed a unique esports intellectual property (IP), attempted to crowdfund their game through a

kickstarter campaign, engaged with blockchain technologies, launched a digital storefront, managed contracts, and worked for various organisations under piecemeal contracts I

explored how they grappled with precarious working conditions, how they engaged with emerging technologies (such as blockchain) to keep their doors open, dynamically responded

to shifts in the industry, and how this work was shaped by the specifics of the Australian games industry

GOATi serves as an exemplar case of how small-scale studios navigate the economic

instability of the modern games industry I explore these by detailing the different practices the team engaged in to deal with this instability The following terms and themes are

explored:

• ‘hustling’ – a mode of overwork and constantly looking for the next job or contract

• alternative economic models and emerging technologies

• building repositories of technology that enable them to work with, and across, various industries

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In revealing GOATi’s ‘on the ground’ work through direct engagement and interviews, I explore how games are being made between the large-scale mainstream industry and the small-scale, do-it-yourself (DIY) artistic space This thesis also creates a historical account of the on-the-ground work of a studio engaged with blockchain technologies Rising as a new form of decentralised technology, and a space GOATi was already interfacing with These technologies served to help the team, eventually find stability as a studio in this new space With the prevalence of small-scale studios both in Melbourne, Australia and worldwide, research must grapple with how these studios survive within creative industries As

highlighted by the Games Action Plan (City of Porth Philip, 2020) the games industry makes

up 17% of the design industry – with small studios (I believe) serving as an important part of this industry, and an important role in the culture and economics of the Australian games industry This study thus details how a small-scale studio was able to escape precarity

through emerging technologies and the hustle for contract work

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1 Introduction

This study follows Greatest of All Time Interactive Entertainment (GOATi), a small

Melbourne-based games studio, as they managed uncertain and precarious labour and sought

to create financial stability It explores how the context, size and economic situation of a small-scale studio affects their development, creative practice and labour The research

details how GOATi navigated the Australian games industry between the years 2019 and

2020 by documenting the hands-on experiences of the team during this time1 Using an organisational ethnographic approach, I explore how GOATi funded and built new

intellectual properties (IPs), the working conditions, labour and how their intent, purpose and objectives shifted during this time During my time with the team, they were working on their

esports racing title 22nd Racing Series (Appendix A, Figure 1), as well as transitioning to focus on their blockchain-based digital storefront Pavillion (Appendix B, Figure 2)

1 This research went on hiatus around 2020-2021 as my own precarious work impacted on my study, alongside working through the 2020 Melbourne Lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Figure 1: Pavillion Hub Figure 2: 22nd Racing Series

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Through this study, I explore how the team’s precarious labour shaped their working habits and pushed the team to ‘hustle’, a mode of overwork typified by a constant search for the next contract, job or connection to guarantee income I also explore the team’s transition to a form of stability through embracing new technologies in the form of blockchain to find a community I also examine how the team used this and their other proprietary technology to act as a repository they could sell to organisations, both inside and outside the games

industry

During my time with GOATi, the team consisted of three core people: two industry veterans – an artist/lead (Garth) and a programmer (Brooke) – and a communications/events manager (Fotini) who is married to Garth The team are not anonymised, because doing so removes an important human aspect to their work, and they are specific people making specific choices

As a public and highly recognisable company with strong ties to the local industry, and as their game was being funded in part by outside contracts and government grants the team could not be effectively anonymised As such consent has been obtained for all relevant people's names to be used through this document

Project aims

This project specifically looks at:

• The team’s independence from a traditional publisher and investment models and the precarity this created for them

• How this precarity was managed through overwork and a constant grind for new contracts while completing existing ones

videogame creative industries’ (2019, p 30) The present study intends to address this gap within current games studies and production studies research, detailing the on-the-ground situated actions (Suchman, 2006) and the processes of games production within small-scale game development studios GOATi serves as an exemplar (Flyvbjerg, 2006) of how work is being done in these smaller studios – revealing some of the specific ways that studios like GOATi do not easily fit into the older, traditional model or new, more informal structures of game making – and instead reveal another way games are being made This study thus uses GOATi as an example of how the games industry and studios are adapting to the new spaces and situations created by the industry’s changing landscape in Melbourne

Of particular importance to my work is how the games industry in Australia and Melbourne has changed since the 2010s New, less-formalised and small-scale modes of games

production have become more common due to the democratisation of tools, the collapse of larger studios due to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) (Banks & Cunningham, 2016) along with local government funding (Keogh, 2019) My work addresses this through documenting GOATi’s work in the two years I was engaged with them, to understand how they were, and were not, part of this shift in games production modes, and looks at the contextual

environments they were part of in Australia Specifically, this work addresses how the team

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dealt with precarity as a small-scale development studio and the changes this pushed the team

to make, in terms of focus and development I also discuss how GOATi’s intended markets across the development of their game and platform and the associated cultures, put certain

pressures on their development and affected how the studio’s work was done In doing so, I

address one part of the ‘exploding range of informal videogame development practices’ (Keogh, 2019, p 30) – that of the teams coming from formalised studios and moving into informal structures

GOATi engaged with a huge variety of different spaces as they created their Game 22nd

Racing Series, and later their platform Pavillion Hub 22nd Racing Series is an ‘RTS-Racing Game with Esports DNA at its core’("22 Racing Series", 2020) – a 3D racing game that pits single players or teams against one another in a race to complete a set number of laps

Creative Victoria, the government body in charge of funding for digital games in the state of Victoria, had been hesitant to fund esports titles in the past2, leading, in the beginning, to GOATi’s looking for other ways to support the creation of their game Alongside the esports arena, my time with GOATi crossed over with the team’s movement into blockchain

technologies and the creation of their game’s platform Pavillion to support this Blockchain represents a relatively new technology in game spaces, involving several small and large game developers engaged in for a variety of different goals and outcomes To GOATi,

Blockchain was a new economic model for players and developers – they believed to better help keep people making games;

2 Mentioned by Garth early in my time with the team as one of the reasons they had not been able to get

Creative Victoria funding early on in 22 nd Racing Series’ development

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one of the guys who's come onto our team He has his own game that made a couple hundred thousand dollars on steam, which is just kind of like paid some wages, but then it went down and out of money… [H]e's putting his game into Pavillion as well He's going to do a deep integration with NFT's … He's like, you know what? He can see the light It's like, yes Like there, there is my market as well (Garth, interview 2021)

However, Blockchain technologies and their environmental impacts are a point of contention between development communities and game design practices (Game Developers

Conference, 2021), leading to more tension for GOATi as they worked to build stability for themselves Alongside this, I also lay out the field of games production studies and situate my work as part of that ongoing conversation

Structure of this thesis

Chapter 2: Literature review presents the underpinnings of this research, the foundations of games production studies, and how this study is situated as a part of that field

Chapter 3: Methodology presents the study approach using organisational ethnography and case study thinking

Chapter 4: Precarity and labour examines GOATi and labour, setting out how the teams’ independence and positioning within the games industry in Australia created precarity for them and how this was managed through many contracts, connections and work for different organisations – mostly outside the traditional games space

Chapter 5: Blockchain and boundary objects details the team’s use of their technology and the embracing of new technologies as a way for them to create stability as a studio I consider how they used their technology as a repository to connect with a variety of different

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organisations, as well as their move to use newer technologies and economic tools such as blockchain to find new revenue streams This research also provides a detailed description and reflection on how small-scale games production is done, from an on-the-ground

perspective, looking at how teams such as GOATi navigate the games industry

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2 Literature review

This work is concerned primarily with games production studies; a growing part of games studies that explores how, where, who and in what contexts videogames are produced It is not primarily concerned with a game or its players – instead, games production studies follow

in the suite of other production-focused research disciplines such as Science and Technology Studies (STS), by looking at the whole swathe of what goes into the creation of games, and documenting the work of making games As laid out in the collection Games Production Studies, ‘A critical reflection of videogame production can uncover the economic, cultural, and political structures that influence the final form of games’ (Sotamaa & Švelch, 2020, p 7), and in turn, this critical reflection allows us to explore and understand the labour of

making games without mythologising In looking at and exploring these, the local industry must be explored and the specific Australian context that this work is deeply enmeshed with

In exploring this work, the precarious nature of modern creative labour also reveals itself, as skilled developers move between small companies and projects, struggling to find stability (Kong, 2011) The study of precarious work, and specifically precarious creative work, is not new and serves as an important aspect of understanding the specifics of Games Production that my research is concerned with These three areas – precarity, games production and the Australian context – serve as the key background for this research and help place the

scholarship into the wider ongoing discussion of how videogames are made, and under what circumstances Through this thesis, I further engage with each of these topics as they become relevant in my analysis of work practice at GOATi To place this work within the wider context of games production studies, I address how games production studies approach the field of ethnography, as well as research concerning the specific context of Australian games

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production, monetisation of games, and how games production fits within a wider context of precarious work

Games Production Studies

Researchers in games production studies are concerned with all the parts and scales of game creation, from artistic protest games to independent studios with middling success to the largest Triple-A productions In documenting and analysing the work done in this space, the people who do it, and where and how it is done, the idea of a monolithic singular industry can

be refuted (Sotamaa & Švelch, 2020) What is instead revealed is that the work of making games is contextual, multifaceted and at times contradictory (Sotamaa & Švelch, 2020) Production studies cover a variety of topics; however, this study is specifically concerned with the located contextual accounts of game-making practices

Regional perspectives on game development practices reveal how the specifics of place and context shape the games, and the labour of those making them, from production across

various eastern European countries (Švelch, 2020; Ozimek, 2020) to how British students are joining the games industry (Harvey, 2019), to the history and current practices of Chinese studios (Nakamura & Wirman, 2020) Earlier research into game studio practices, such as O’Donnell (2014), tackles the located and context-specific practices of development –

specifically how these change between the head studios in Western counties, compared with the practices found in the outsourcing studios they hired In addition, Aphra Kerr’s discussion (2017) of the global games industry notes the specifics of located practices, and how they interface with a globalised industry – exploring how cultural funds, as well as creative

collectives, have shaped the kinds of work produced by these spaces Kerr notes how these spaces form communities of practice that are located, and specific to their location (2017)

Australia has a rich history of Games Production studies Banks and Humphrey's work on creative practices (2008), McCrea’s discussion of the industries' destruction and

co-reconstruction (2012), Banks and Cunningham's ongoing work in studying creative labour in the Australian Games Industry (2016), and Keogh's large-scale research on game making in Australia (2019,2021) Keogh’s work is of particular importance to my work as he expands the scope of games production to encompass workers and developers who are engaging in informal development, and the gradation between these (Keogh, 2019; 2021) This study is specifically in conversation with Keogh’s work because both are concerned with how games are being made, by whom and the conditions that shape these practices Keogh is concerned with the cultural field of games production outside the dominant structures – instead looking

at the way the global games-making industry is fragmenting and different modes and scales

of production are emerging (Keogh, 2019) Where Keogh has attended to those on the fringes

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of development and highlighted how their labour is performed and constructed (2021), my work looks at the space between these fringes and the traditional industry – to address the semi-informal studios – outside the blockbuster, multinational developer/publisher structure

of North American, Japanese and European massive studios and toward the developers

working in smaller-scale independent studios In doing so, this work attends to the changing shape of the games industry and how this is shaped by the specific contextual and located factors of the Australian games industry

Following studios

Ethnographies engaged as on-the-ground studies of game development studios are not new, and provide rich detail of everyday work practices, revealing the complex ways work is performed to create games O’Donnell’s work (2014) serves as a useful starting point to examine these topics and the specifics of technology, people and systems that make up the historical games industry – from an on-the-ground perspective O’Donnell’s focus is ‘an in-depth ethnographic look at the collaborative work and tools of the videogame industry’, rather than focussing on a singular part of the industry or process (O’Donnell, 2009, p 4) O’Donnell is concerned with the numerous actors, contexts and intersections of these that make up the wider industry in question In documenting this work, O’Donnell lays out how these large studios interface with technology, other studios, and with a globalised

infrastructure of outsourcing (2009) His work serves as a foundation of what a traditional studio looked and looks like – how and who does the work making a game, from the people programming it, to the leads and designers Even from O’Donnell’s perspective focusing on North American studios, there are familiar practices to consider how historically Australian studios were set up, and how these have changed This foundation is then built on by

researchers who have continued to document this work from the inside, and by researchers

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who have unpicked the contextual specifics, including regional changes that have swept across the industry in the years following O’Donnell’s text Of specific importance to this work is Bulut’s ethnography, following a large game studio form 2020 – which serves to highlight both how the industry has and has not changed since O’Donnell’s work – as well as highlights the specifics of the modern Games Industry

In following a studio (Referred to as Desire) Bulut tracks the movement of the studio from independence to acquisition and eventual collapse (2020) – exploring how games are made

by Desire, alongside how the labour of Desire’s works enmeshed with various other factors such as the precarious nature of their work at all levels, the techno masculine culture, the unseen labour of partners, how the studio shaped the location it was in Bulut’s work

importantly highlights the way the precarity exists at all levels of the games industry – from the independent developers, to those employed by larger studios

Books such as Games Production Studies (Sotamaa & Švelch, 2020), Keogh’s ongoing research into the Australian industry (2019,2020,2021), Kerr's research into the globalised Games Industry (2017) alongside research exploring precarity in the modern games industry (Bulut, 2014; Lipkin, 2020) have all built on this effort to document the work of developers However, O’Donnell’s alongside Bulut’s work serves as an important foundation to

understand where the production of games was in the 2010s, and later, and thus examine how this has evolved in the following years Specifically in Australia with the industry moving from a secretive industry dominated by a few larger studios pre the GFC, to a more

communal and open industry made up of large, small and independent creators (Keogh, 2020) These works as such look at how the industry has further globalised and fractured, and how in turn, this has affected the work performed by smaller teams with global ambitions

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Each of these texts that this work uses as a foundation has applied these questions to larger and more traditional forms of games production compared to the scale of emerging games production modes As O’Donnell notes, the games industry was, at the time he was writing, a secretive, and (even more so now, than when he was originally writing) globalised industry; meaning it was one in which the actual work performed could be difficult to unpick In

contrast, the modern Australian games industry as noted by Keogh (2020) – has shifted away from secretive towards solidarity and collaboration These texts serve as the baseline from which I begin my documentation and analysis of the work done by GOATi and will be

explored in the main body of my analysis However, each of these texts is concerned with a traditional scale of games production, in a traditional mode This includes describing the aspects of development, such as how developers interact and co-create with fans (Banks, 2013); how game design work is done, and shaped in a particular studio (Romine, 2016), and finally, the way tools, software and studios function are shaped by access to knowledge (Banks, 2009) This research looks at how these factors are now engaged with and moved away from by these smaller, and more collaborative studios and how the situations and

contextual factors change and morph for these different scales of company

specifically concerned with Romine focuses on a large American studio (BlueSky), and Banks on a mid-sized Australian studio (Auran) Banks’ work looking at co-creative practices

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explores how fan communities and designers are both engaged in the design and production work of making games (2013) Banks follows and works with Auran Studio to explore these specific practices, looking at how the team worked with, and incorporated, fan-generated content into their game Specifically, Banks describes these practices as a ‘connection and relationship’ (2013, p 3) between the developers and the amateurs in the community

Romine’s work, following BlueSky (2016), grounds an important aspect of this research As Romine states, ‘The technologies of today are shaped by the imaginative capacities of their developers, which are constituted by the many social, economic, and historical factors of their local situation’ (Romine, 2016, p 195) The highlights that to understand the games and technologies being made – we must attend to the context and social conditions games are made within

By following the work of designers within one studio working on one game, Romine is able

to explore how the work done is shaped by, and shapes the ‘social imaginary’ (Romine, 2016,

p 8) The social imaginary Romine refers to are the shared meaning-making systems by which ‘actions are imagined to be moral or immoral, possible or impossible, legitimate or illegitimate, and everything else in between’ (2016, p 10) In highlighting the way that social and contextual change feed into the design, and feeds back out into the social, the work draws out how the specific situatedness of GOATi feeds into the work performed, and the game being made Romine’s research helps reveal how the work can become ‘fractured when subjected to the extended pressures of changing industry demands and player expectations’ (Romine, 2016, p 9)

Thus, Romine’s and Banks’ research serve as useful lenses to understand how the work performed by GOATi is, and is not, different to that which has been documented before, and

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thus how the industry has shifted and moved in the intervening years Relevant to my

research, Banks’ work highlights the particular importance that their community had as GOATi developed the game and attended various events While the companies documented

by Romine and Banks exist within a different context and mode, the role of co-creative practices as labour by fans can be seen as similar to the role fans have with GOATi;

specifically, how the co-creative practice exists as part of wider cultural market trends, and as

a technological challenge faced by developers (Banks, 2013) It is of vital importance to understand how the work of game development is performed by these smaller studios, and understanding how they interact with the culture and community around their game

By documenting this and revealing how the work of designers becomes shaped by the

contextual situation, Romine provides a scaffold and counterpoint to my research Romine’s work offers a particular set of situated factors that allow me to contrast how development differs and is changed by the shape, scale and economic situation that GOATi exists within And how this then shaped their relationship to new and emerging technologies, and funding models that already existed Exposing how GOATi’s work must be understood in the context

of its specific moment in history – and how they monetised these to create stability

Monetisation

Discussions around how the studio navigated monetisation within the modern context of game development are of interest to my work with GOATi Monetisation for studios has historically meant selling games to players and contracting work done for other studios For GOATi this took the form of work for hire on projects funded by outside organisations3

3 Such practices are common in the Australian industry, both recently and historically (Banks & Cunningham, 2016)

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working on games such as LA Noire, Darkness 2, and Zelda: Twilight Princess HD and in

licencing their technology such as REVGEN4 and Real-Time Traffic Simulations With the cost of making traditional large-scale games rising along with the ubiquity of other platforms such as mobile, developers have turned to new ways to enable players to spend money on their games, such as free-to-play tied to in-game transactions These models utilise small-scale transactions, and these ‘microtransactions resemble coin-op arcade machines; in both cases, the unit price is small but can stack up with repeated purchases’ (Roessel & Švelch,

2020, p 200) Mostly, these transactions come in three forms:

1 cosmetic, changes to the visual look of a game or avatar,

2 pay-to-win in which transactions can convey an in-game advantage, and

3 loot boxes with a random assortment of either cosmetic or advantagous in-game items are given (Zendle, Meyer, & Cairns, et al., 2020)

These models have not been without controversy Certain monetisation practices, such as loot boxes (random draw in-game item boxes), are now being regulated in various places across the world (Perks, 2020)

My work, however, explores the changing monetisation practices of studios like GOATi, as they embrace emerging monetisation/democratisation/decentralisation technologies such as blockchain and grapple with the tensions these raise in the industry These decentralised financial tools provide a way of tracking digital ownership This monetisation form reveals one way small studios like GOATi have pivoted to achieve financial stability Blockchain is a significant monetisation tool and technology enabled GOATi to move out of precarity

4 REVGEN is GOATi’s proprietary rendering engine

contracts, to professional and freelancing-style project work Specific to my research is the precarious work seen in highly skilled, creative industries: freelancing, and work-for-hire jobs – both common modes of work for GOATi In discussion of precarity in the creative digital sector, Kong lays out that:

workers do not belong to the traditional employment setup organized around a firm or corporation Instead, in moving from portfolio to portfolio, assignment to assignment, they replace a job for life with one corporation with frequent changes of employment and periods of self employment (Kong, 2011, p 1)

These precarious workers can be, for instance, young adult musicians ‘choosing’ precarity to find fulfilment in their work and maintain creative careers (Threadgold, 2018), creative entrepreneurs moving between jobs in both creative and non-creative industries (Kong, 2011), alongside non-traditional developers and artists deliberately eschewing larger industry positions to pursue creative projects (Keogh, 2021)

This situation is well reflected across the literature in discussions of creative industries and economies, as Murray and Gollmitzer state: ‘there is little opposition to the view that cultural work currently is more intensively casualised, and indeed, more precarious as a whole, than

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the general labour force’(2012, p 422) This precarity is echoed within the games industry, and studies of various studios and roles within them (Bulut, 2014; Kerr 2017; Lipkin, 2020) Banks and Cunningham specifically detail the precarity found in the Australian industry (2016) They note:

Some developers celebrate the creative freedom they experienced following the shift toward producing original IP games for mobile platforms, while others caution about the compromises associated with in-app monetisation mechanics The turmoil transforming the Australian games industry exemplifies precariousness But it also includes adaptive experimentation in studio culture and associated changes in professional developer identity so as to continue the craft of making games in the midst of uncertainty (Banks & Cunningham, 2016)

Looking at the work undertaken by GOATi in the terms of creative labour and precarity allows my research to position production as part of the wider conversation around how creative labour can sustain itself and the demands precarity places on those working in these sectors, as well GOATi’s position within the games industry, helps to reveal how studios and workers are transforming to enable them to keep making games Precarious work reveals how the creative labour undertaken in the games industry is linked to wider trends across the creative industries – and specifically how GOATi’s work fits into these trends Precarious work occurs across both creative and non-creative industries, alongside a large-scale and wide portfolio of work to manage the risky nature of creative labour (Kong, 2011)

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did not aim to be League of Legends scale, the intention to make a large sporting experience

was core to the team’s ambitions For the studio lead, this was in part from an interest in motorsports and linked to the team’s creation of a racing game To Garth, the goal was to create a game, and system on which other people would be able to run tournaments of their own design – building a set of competitive rules that worked for them and the community In this way, esports represents the market and community GOATi intended to engage with, and therefore serve as an important aspect in understanding the work GOATi engaged in to bring

in and court the community Brown and Billings highlight the high avidity of esports fans, while also noting that interest in esports aligns with interest in traditional sports as they stem from similar motivations (Brown, Billings, Murphy, et al 2018) Chalmet’s discussion of how managers can leverage advertising within esports as a market growth opportunity

(2015), and further research in this space explores how marketing and branding have been used by various companies as esports evolved and continue to evolve (Gawryiak, Burton, Jenny, et al., 2020) While esports is still a growing industry, it is worth noting that in its current state, the space is dominated by Triple-A scale games – with hundred-million dollar budgets and teams in the hundreds (Johnson & Woodcock; 2021) However smaller studios have become involved in recent years – with games like Farming Simulator, and Skull Girls alongside other titles It was this scale of esports that GOATi were interested in; as a way for the team to make the game they wanted, and to use it as a platform from which people could build an esports

The largest esports titles (League of Legends, DOTA 2, CSGO, Valorant, Fortnite) are also all

owned by large-scale corporations such as Valve (who also own the largest PC games market – Steam), Tencent and Electronic Arts – which are all able to support huge prize pools

However, smaller games do find success inside the esports space, with events such as EVO, a

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large-scale fighting game tournament hosted in America, regularly hosting smaller newer titles alongside the main stage Esports represents both a massive market and community that GOATi was interested in, as well as a competitive space for a team of GOATi’s small size to engage with

Chapter Summary

This chapter lays out the literature that this work builds on, laying the foundations that are further explored in later chapters – and highlighting the areas my work intends to move across Based in Games Production studies, I look at how the work of documenting and analysing the labour of making games, who does it and exploring beyond the monolithic AAA industry has been done – and reveal the way the global industry is fragmenting and exposing the different modes and scales of production are emerging (Keogh, 2019) –

positioning my own work firmly within this space Specifically I am concerned with the the-ground work of games development studios, and using this to provide a rich detail of everyday practices, and reveal the complex ways work is performed to create games

on-Drawing on this work I can approach and look at how these effect smaller studios like

GOATi and how the situations and contextual factors change and morph for different scales

of company

To situate GOATi, Esports cannot be ignored Dominated by companies with massive

budgets and teams (Johnson & Woodcock; 2021) – but also a place where many smaller games are able to build dedicated communities With GOATi’s game 22nd Racing Series

being explicitly aimed at esports as a market they saw opportunity in – and an important note

that effected how they leveraged, branded and sold 22 nd Racing Series

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In looking at how GOATi worked, I draw on the work of John Banks and Morgen Romine which serve as useful lenses to understand how the work down by GOATi both is and is not different from larger studios Highlighting how the teams engagement with community, both with the wider development community and fan shaped and moulded what GOATi did – and how they where able to keep afloat using these Specifically, how the team monetised their work, both inside their game – and in their work as a studio For GOATi this was

predominately work for hire on projects funded by outside organisations – a common funding model However as GOATi embraced emerging

monetisation/democratisation/decentralisation technologies such as blockchain they where able to diversify their funding – and thus move out of precarity

Precarious work serves as one of the important lenses that my work explores GOATi through – This mode of work is defined as non-stable work that is generally short-term, where there is

no guarantee of continued financial stability (Curtin & Sanson, 2016) In looking at GOATi I lean on the work around precarity, both in games and in the games industry to unpack the forces and structures that defined GOATi’s labour – and in this way document and expose the specific historical moment that GOATi where able to move from precarious work to stability

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3 Methods

This research took place over 2019 and 2020 covering two years of GOATi’s development

and push to release their game 22nd Racing Series GOATi is a small-scale Australian

videogame development studio, primarily engaged in work for hire for outside organisations,

while also developing their IP This study works to understand how new small-scale

development studios engage in the work of making games and navigate the specific

contextual situations they exist within During my time with the team, they were developing

22nd Racing Series and a digital storefront called Pavillion Hub The team at GOATi

represents a specific mode of independent studio – a hyper-small team (comprised of 2 core developers) working on a game they aimed at global distribution The team was

predominately made up of professionals already established in the industry with

commitments such as mortgages, and kids that also served to shape how they worked

My research approaches its case study inspired by the methodology of organisational

ethnography This is a methodology that is concerned with studying organisations from the inside, following workers as they do the work, rather than in questionnaires (Ybema, Yanow, Wels, Kamsteeg; 2009); specifically, ‘by attending to the extraordinary in the mundane, day-to-day aspects of organizing, can lead to a fuller, more grounded, practice-based

understanding of organizational life’ (Ybema, Yanow, Wels, Kamsteeg; 2009, p 2) In

looking at the mundane day-to-day work done by GOATi I detail how they did the work of games creation, and navigated a precarious creative industry I explored how they adapted as

a studio to create stability – and kept their lights on The significance of this work is that it details the on-the-ground work and experiences of this work, and the ways this was shaped by the highly specific context GOATi existed in

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My period of primary engagement took place in 2019 over a 6 month period in the lead-up to PAX Australia5 (Figure 3), the launch of the team’s kickstarter, and PAX Australia itself (Figure 4) While volunteering with the team I predominately worked with Fotini – and I was involved in their efforts to research esports and build community, creating documentation and setting up social spaces for players My other main role was on the floor with the team at events, where I introduced new players to the game and helped work the booth and run the tournaments During my time with the team they were working on various contracts, such as

their driver training game MyDriveSchool 6 , as well as development of 22 nd Racing Series and Pavillion Hub, alongside their ongoing engagements with Phantasma chain, and AMD

Following this period of engagement, I then conducted a series of exit interviews across 2020 and early 2021 These focused on the outcome of the work I assisted with in 2019 and on their experiences in 2020 running their blockchain sale and the transition to focus on their

platform Pavillion Hub Ethics for this project was approved (Project number B 22720-02/20)

and consent was gained for all published information Alongside these major projects, the team also engaged in a series of smaller projects – new and ongoing – with various

stakeholders, which informed the data collection of this research

5 PAX Australia is the largest consumer facing expos in Australia – Run in Melbourne it is one of the main spaces studios such as GOATi show their games to consumers, generate press interest and build community

6 MyDriveSchool is one of GOATi’s ongoing long term projects – a serious educational game that teaches driving skills - GOATi where the main development team behind the game

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Figure 3: Engagement Timeline

Figure 4: Booth at Pax Australia 2019

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While working with the team, I engaged in unstructured conversations and debriefs to

understand what the team was doing, had done, and where they were planning to go One such example of this kind of conversation occurred prior to and post PAX 2019, around if there would be a dedicated competitive computer It was decided in the lead-up that both available machines would be public, used to both teach people to play as well as for

competition as there was little room for more as they wanted to show off the game to as many people as possible in the lead up to their kickstarter However, in a review after the event, the team noted that this became a huge problem as players began to “play interference” by

guarding their competitive leads by teaching newer players and stopping other players from practising Garth noted that he had only been made aware of this when a player pointed it out

to him and that we on the floor running the booth had effectively been in the position of umpire for a competition and not realised it These conversations revealed how the work we had done on the floor had been informed by our expectation of showing off a game at a larger event; trying to build the community that was desired for the upcoming kickstarter, and not running a competition Importantly, it is this understanding of the space, context and situation

that the work is done in, that shapes how the work is done Owing to the focus on getting new

people into the game, the competitive side of the event was left by the wayside, subverting the team's goals to sell the game as one with “Esports DNA at its core” ("22 Racing Series", 2020)

After my main time with the team, I conducted a series of exit interviews with Garth and Fotini (Figure 5) to discuss how some of the projects I had been tracking and helped with had gone, and how the team had navigated 2020, the failure of their kickstarter and their pivot to focusing on blockchain

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Figure 5: Pax Aus 2019 booth setup – Garth & Fotini

My research utilises the methodology of organisational ethnography; specifically working with research processes and concepts discussed by Lucy Suchman in studying labour

practices within complex technological fields (2006) Linked to this are the works of

O’Donnell (2009), Banks (2013) and Romine (2016), who have applied this methodology specifically to games and videogame production By weaving together ethnographic

documentation of GOATi alongside a case study analysis of their position and labour, I explore how GOATi moved between these various spaces, both within the games industry and outside it, and their different modes of work I explore and detail the labour performed at GOATi, and how their goals, scale, economic situation, and technology reveal how small studios in Australia adapt to the precarity and the tumultuousness of games development In using organisational ethnography to recognise labour practices, I have been able to ‘consider just those fleeting circumstances that our interpretations of action systematically rely on, but which our accounts of action routinely ignore’ (Suchman, 2006, p 118) Organisational

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ethnography is foundationally ethnography, meaning that it is concerned with the interactions

of a community at a site; however, these sites are the organisation – the everyday setting from which much of our social life is enacted

The very ‘ordinariness’ of normality often prevents us from seeing it: we tend to have

a blind spot for what is usual, ordinary, routine Moreover, immersion in the particular settings of our daily lives often leads to a rather poor awareness of the social processes that contextualize them (Ybema, Yanow, Wels, & Kamstee; 2009,

p 1)

For this work, I primarily engaged in participant observations, meaning that I was part of the community I was studying – As a game developer, I was able to fit with the team and work with them as a fellow developer – I came to the team as an already practicing, and established game developer with an insider understanding of the work Garth and Brooke did, as well as experience and knowledge I was able to share with Fortini This positionality meant that I was already able to participate as part of the teams community– able to talk and communicate with them from this ingroup position As De Garis argues I came at this work as a direct participant in it, I was specifically interested I ethnography as a “shared experience” (1999, p.67) This made working with the team a smoother process and enabled the team to describe and discuss how they worked with greater detail This also meant the team was more

comfortable sharing the difficult realities of development work as I was part of the

community and understood some of the precarity and financial struggles that came to

epitomise the team's experience However, this position also meant that as the team moved into different spaces and embraced technologies such as Blockchain I questioned my own role within the team - As personally I am uninterested in financial technologies and

blockchain but was invested in how they served a team like GOATi to find stability As Highlighted by Emerson et al;

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As a participant who has a place in the local setting and who has some degree of involvement with the people in it, the researcher is part of the world being studied and not a neutral, detached observer The process of forming relationships with specific people subjects the ethnographer to their meaning systems, ones that must be learned and understood, if only in order to get by (2011, p 247)

This meant that as controversy arose within the wider game’s community (Chapter 5) I questioned my role as a researcher – as invested in the people in the team, but also part of the wider community However, in completing this work my goal is to highlight as De Garis does, the sensuous and specific feeling of this work, at this time - because “you can’t tell unless you’re in there” (1999,71)

Methodologically, this approach aims to gain access to insider knowledge, the “knowing-how knowledge”, the embodied ability to get work done, that is not necessarily verbalised or even easily conceptualized’ (Kostera, 2021, p 38) This led to a closeness in how my research and relationships were formed with the team that went beyond my role as a researcher This approach can lead to considering the field and those studied unproblematically, looking uncritically and not stepping back from the field the researcher has studied However, this issue is also one of the important aspects of this work: ‘Ethnography acquires its reliability and trustworthiness thanks to the researcher’s being there’ (Kostera, 2021, p 42) That is, to

be there and document the work required me to join the team doing it, and through this, become part of their community By doing so, I was able to understand and be part of the work performed

Thus, I engaged in a form of sensuous ethnography (de Garis, 1999) This entailed

approaching the sites to engage with, and as part of, the community being studied In de Garis’s work on wrestling and wrestling gyms, he references texture that is added to the research by understanding the bodily interactions and communication made by wrestlers with

of my work

As an approach to studying game development, organisational ethnography has been used previously It has enabled researchers to document studio practices around design (Romine, 2016; Banks, 2013), internal structures and knowledge sharing (O’Donnell, 2009) and the experience of precarity in large studios (Bulut, 2020) This understanding can expose how the material and the social relationships of these spaces are shaped As well the use of this

methodology allowed each of these authors to act as a break within the system, a point of contact that was not part of the ongoing structure (O’Donnell, 2009) In my own experiences,

it was a way to encourage and create a space for the people I worked with to reflect and discuss their own experiences, rather than moving on to the next tasks The methodology also allows the author to be part of the system and engage in the labour performed, while being part of and documenting these spaces (Romine, 2016; Banks, 2013)

Both Romine and Banks worked within the companies they studied; doing the work of game development as they studied the organisation around them As Romine states about her own experiences:

a ‘fuller insight into… their activities’ (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011) I was able to see how the team managed and bounced between projects – how they prioritised different contracts and the ways that these also pulled away and forced them to overwork or delay significant milestones for the team In being there with the team I was also able to experience this push and tug of work, helping them get ready for PAX Australia and their kickstarter, as well as working the event I was able to be there for the long days on the show floor, the failure of the kickstarter and the emotions around it alongside the day-to-day small wins and

difficulties In doing so, the precarity, independence and the studio’s practices became

apparent and I was able to see how these affected the team Organisational ethnography and

my sensuous engagement with GOATi enabled me to better understand what it meant to be there with the team through these experience, and to connect with the small team at GOATi, becoming part of that small community

My goal for this, as Suchman states, was to ‘make the relation between interpretations of action and action circumstances [my] subject matter’ (2006, p 118) I have applied

Suchman’s approach of ‘situated actions’ (2006); this being an understanding that we must look at ‘processes whereby particular, uniquely constituted circumstances are systematically interpreted’ (Suchman, 2006, p 84) This brings the relations and interactions of people and their material reality into focus Suchman is not concerned with being the ‘detective’, who is looking to piece together a picture from the aftermath and separate accounts of what has

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happened (Suchman, 2006) Rather, Suchman positions the research within the moment,

intending to describe what happens, rather than divine it from the aftermath

Applying this methodology to the case study of GOATi means that I have concerned myself

with how the work performed was shaped by the factors and contexts of their situation This

has enabled me to explore how the studios performed their work across a huge number of different fields; from GOATi’s office, at live events, and on online networked spaces where fans congregated This is significant because it highlights and documents labour that is

currently less understood in this industry, revealing the lived experiences of those creating these new digital Ips – how they feel about the work, what they are seeing, hearing and how they are proceeding

In my time as a volunteer with GOATi, I was directly involved in the following:

● all day helping to run booths at single and multiday events GOATi was involved in – onboarding players and helping run tournaments

● Booth setup, and pack up – before and after long event days

● taking notes around these events as to how they were running – following how players responded to different ways of setting up and running the booth

● working with the communications manager to create documents, research tools and discussions with fans

● post-event meetings and summary notetaking

● continually documenting the process for internal reflection, as well as documentation after-event reflection for the team

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Data collection took the form of field notes (note-taking) during meetings and discussions with the team leading up to and after the events plus note-taking and photographic

documentation during events This documentation was notionally generated for internal use

by the team to help track and plan events and work moving forward This knowledge forms the basis of my research following its release to me by GOATi Also, my work involved doing research with, and for, the communications manager to help them find tools and

resources for the studio’s plans to run esports events

By approaching my experience with the team as a case study, I was better able to place it within the Australian context and the historical moment that it occurred My work reveals and learns about the goings-on in this space, to capture the ‘depth – detail, richness,

completeness, and within-case variance’ (Flyvbjerg, 2011, p 314); that is to say, it examines this specific period for GOATi, around 2019–2020, as a rich resource, rather than as an expansive understanding of GOATi’s general labour Case studies, Flyvbjerg, notes are not a

methodology in and of themselves, instead, they are a demarcation of a specific space (or

case) that is being studied (Flyvbjerg, 2011) Using my experiences and the information I produced for GOATi during this time, helped to define a particular moment and, through a

deeply focused study of this case, reveal the specific contextual information that shaped the

work performed, by approaching this case through organisational ethnography - attending to the situated actions of the team, exposing the doing that informs the Case eschew

generalisation and seek to draw out the specifics In doing so, I could draw out the ways of working specific to GOATi, and how these were in turn shaped by their context and situation, exposing how GOATi serves as an exemplar case of how small independent studios are making games and keeping afloat This also allowed me to focus on the specific moment that GOATi where working on, as they moved from precarity – to stability – documenting this

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moment for the team This specific moment has features less in other studies – such as

O’Donnell’s, Romaine’s or Bulut’s – as each of those takes place in a larger studio that has already made it These studies where able to interview their participants as to how work had changed – offering reflections, being there gave me a direct view as to what stability changed for the team in the moment, and the immediate work that it took to get there

As referenced above, organisational ethnography is not interested in the generalities of work,

but the specifics of the work performed at this site The ordinariness of work is localised and

specific – and in the games industry, where there are huge differences in types, makeup and kinds of studios to account for, a generalised approach would miss out on the highly

contextual factors that shape the day-to-day interactions of GOATi The tight focus means I was able to enmesh myself with both the work and team, as well as address and understand the material interactions and highly specific knowledge and work done by GOATi

As well as my in-person situatedness with the team, I also engaged in a series of

post-interviews with the team These post-interviews were opportunities to hear from the people I worked with about how the team had continued or changed direction after my initial time with them These interviews helped to further flesh out the specifics of the outcomes of labour I witnessed and engaged in while working with the team In specific these interviews,

in conjunctions with my lived experiences with the team, as Keogh lays out, are intended to

account for the actual lives and ambitions of Australian videogame producers, rather than relying on those purely economic and industrial metrics that often have little connection to the lived experiences of those within a field (Keogh, 2021)

By following closely and working with one studio I am able to see and experience what they

do – and follow the lived experience on the ground Through this approach and method, I could document the work and experiences of GOATi – and explore how this small-scale