For the Love of the Game: Your Job Has Been Removed for Violating Industry Guidelines

Abstract

This thesis asks a deceptively simple question: What is a game developer? Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at three playtesting spaces in New York City (an institutional game design program, a nonprofit game development collective, and a community barcade), I argue that "game developer" is not a description of who makes games, but a mechanism through which the industry organizes labor visibility and manufactures dependency. In Chapter 2, I show how hyperspecialization and institutional frameworks produce a particular kind of developer, rendering most game-makers invisible. Chapter 3 traces how even those who resist industry logic cannot escape its framework and their work is defined by refusal. But Chapter 4 reveals something else: people who never reference the industry at all are already making games. They make them with friends, for slowness, for embodied experience, for creating games that the industry cannot contain or commodify. The thesis destabilizes the category across four chapters from locked gate to broken bars to bypassed entirely, ultimately asking: if the label only had power because people believed they needed it, what happens when they stop asking for permission? This work contributes to game studies scholarship on labor, institutionalization, and creative practice outside profit-driven frameworks.