ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced people's views on work, and a significant portion of the global game industry converted to remote work during the pandemic. To explore the status of game development in this pivotal moment, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 immigrant/expatriate game developers ("game expats") in Finland analyzing their migration push and pull on societal, industrial, social, and individual factors. The results indicate societal and industrial factors simultaneously influencing game expats' migration intention, but with an increasing influence of game corporation's role on developers' both on-the-job and off-the-job embeddedness due to an absence of (local) community activities during the pandemic. The data also reveals that game developers are valuing the physical workspace for face-to-face interactions, despite the industrial norm of digital tools and seamless transition to remote work. Furthermore, an alarming stratification and hierarchization within the game industry were identified, which game developers self-dividing in-house versus outsourced workforce even if they were both required to work remotely. This paper contributes to game studies on game developers' experiences as an attempt to investigate the local context of game development. It is also one of the first snapshots of game work practices in Finland during the Covid-19 era. © 2022 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we explore a teaching experiment utilizing expert-driven online game jams in the context of game design education. Four online game jams were run as a part of an open lecture series on game development between March 2020 and April 2021. The lectures featured visiting experts exploring the jam themes and giving feedback on the submitted games. For the purpose of evaluating the format, we collected the experiences of the jammers and the experts in addition to observing the events. In this short paper, we concentrate only on the experiences of the experts. © 2021 ACM.