Navigating regulations and restrictions in game design teams

Games industry professionals are increasingly required to demonstrate an awareness of regulation and legal restrictions that apply to games and media products. In part this is because digital games have become more complex, distributed to consumers as both products and services across myriad technological platforms and digital stores and with a range of applications. More pressingly, the broadening of the globalised games marketplace and the resultant exposure to divergent geographic regulations on game content is often cited in games industry circles as challenge.

In this talk, I will present recent research we conducted into game design practice involving five multicultural game development teams, all of which were tasked with exploring the complexity of reconciling the impacts of both UK and China gaming regulations on the design work. Three themes emerged from analysis of the data: production practices and transnational working, navigating regulations and restrictions, and market and cultural differences.