The pervasive impact of working within the game industry upon the creative practice of its artists

Abstract

Whether seeking to improve their own practice, or the alignment of academia and students with their own particular domain, professional computer game developers believed that claims their work was inherently creative could prove disingenuous. They believed that new knowledge and theorem regarding the reality of their practice and its impact upon them would encourage more synergistic education models, workplaces, and careers.

As the industry is itself complex and multidisciplinary, it was determined that the most appropriate scope for a single thesis would be a single development discipline, with any generated theory capable of adaptation to other disciplines in the future. The discipline chosen for such immediate consideration was that of the Game Artists, the aim of the research then being to discover,” The pervasive impact of working within the game industry upon the creative practice of its artists”.

It became apparent that while established theory regarding creativity and creative practice might offer some guidance, the incidence of either within the game industry and its artists’ own practice was indeed presumptive and incomplete. Their actual activities were vague, their personal goals or motivations garnering little if any prior research, even while creativity scholars recognised these to be essential elements of its practice. The incidence and influence of each required contextual illumination and insight.

The methodological approach of the phenomenologists was the most appropriate to achieve this, being ideally suited to exploring the incidence and influence of specific key phenomena within a particular populace. Accordingly, an autoethnographic reflection was followed by interviews with 26 veteran game developers whose roles and experience offered key representations of the leading international domains and territories. The subsequent analysis of these informed the design and execution of eight case studies with game artists themselves, the encoding and analysis of which allowed the final generation of three new contributions to knowledge.

Firstly, the ‘Three Cs of Consequence’ model proposes that any professional game artist’s creative practice must inevitably be the product of modulation through compliance, conformity, or catharsis.

Secondly, two novel categorisations of game artists – ‘Technes’ and ‘Aesthetes’ – rationalise how their individual motivation and proclivities may predict the nature and outcome of such modulation.

Thirdly, it is proposed that whatever Technes or Aesthetes their own reasons for working within this industry may not be related to creativity at all, with consequences for their wider creative practice.

Date of Award	27 Oct 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Abertay University
Supervisor	Robin J. S. Sloan (Supervisor) & James Bown (Supervisor)