Article:
The Political Economy of Cultural Memory in the Videogames Industry

dc.creatorLundedal Hammar, Emil
dc.date.accessioned2021-05-06T14:08:18Z
dc.date.available2021-05-06T14:08:18Z
dc.date.issued2019
dc.description.abstractFollowing the materialist approaches to contemporary digital memory-making, this article explores how unequal access to memory production in videogames is determined along economic and cultural lines. Based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with different European, Asian and North American historical game developers, I make the case for how materialist and cultural aspects of videogame development reinforce existing mnemonic hegemony and in turn how this mnemonic hegemony determines access to the production of memory-making potentials that players of videogames activate and negotiate. My interview findings illustrate how individual workers do not necessarily intend to reproduce received systems of power and hegemony, and instead how certain cultural and material relations tacitly motivate and/or marginalise workers in the videogame industries to reproduce hegemonic power relations in cultural memory across race, class and gender. Finally, I develop the argument that access to cultural production networks such as the games industry constitutes important factors that need to be taken seriously in research on cultural memory and game studies. Thus, my article investigates global power relationships, political economy, colonial legacies and cultural hegemony within the videogame industry, and how these are instantiated in individual instances of game developers.en
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15785
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/16620
dc.languageeng
dc.publishertranscript
dc.publisher.placeBielefeld
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2364-2114
dc.relation.ispartofseriesDigital Culture & Society
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subjectkulturelles Gedächtnisde
dc.subjectVideospielde
dc.subjectKulturproduktionde
dc.subjectKulturpolitikde
dc.subjectcultural memoryen
dc.subjectvideo gameen
dc.subjectcultural productionen
dc.subjectcultural politicsen
dc.subject.ddcddc:791
dc.titleThe Political Economy of Cultural Memory in the Videogames Industryen
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typeArticleen
local.coverpage2021-05-29T02:33:07
local.identifier.firstpublisheddoi:https://doi.org/10.14361/dcs-2019-0105
local.source.epage83
local.source.issue1
local.source.issueTitleInequalities and Divides in Digital Cultures
local.source.spage61
local.source.volume5

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