Indie Games in the Digital Age - Paperback

by M. J. Clarke (Editor), Cynthia Wang (Editor)

A host of digital affordances, including reduced cost production tools, open distribution platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity, have engendered the growth of indie games among makers and users, forcing critics to reconsider the question of who makes games and why. Taking seriously this new mode of cultural produciton compells analysts to reconsider the blurred boundaries and relations of makers, users and texts as well as their respective relationship to cultural power and hierarchy. The contributions to Indie Games in the Digital Age consider these questions and examine a series of firms, makers, games and scenes, ranging from giants like Nintendo and Microsoft to grassroots games like Cards Against Humanity and Stardew Valley, to chart more precisely the productive and instructive disruption that this new site of cultural production offers.

Author Biography

M.J. Clarke is an assistant professor of TV Film and Media Studies at Cal State LA, USA. His research on popular culture and media industries has appeared in the journals Television and New Media and The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics as well as the anthologies Superhero Synergies and The Comics of Charles Schulz. His examination of network television at the end of the 20th Century, Transmedia Television, is available from Bloomsbury.

Cynthia Wang is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Cal State LA, USA. Her research takes a critical cultural perspective on how digital media and the Internet reconfigures social relations, cultural practices, and power dynamics. She has published in Social Media + Society, Time & Society, and Journalism Studies among others.