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Indie developers are part of the creative fringe of the video game industry, fashioning an identity for themselves as a community committed to the development of video games as a cultural expression and art form. In playing this role, money-making is ambiguous inasmuch as economic return is honorable if such interests remain unarticulated and execute minimal influence on the development work process, while the possibility of producing a successful commercial video game is simultaneously one of the primary motivations for new industry entrants. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper reports on the empirical material drawn from a study of indie video game developers in Sweden, a leading country for video game development.

To reconcile tensions between video game development in terms of being both cultural/and artistic production and business activity, easily compromising the perceived authenticity of the subject in the eyes of audiences (e.g. hardcore gamers), indie developers distinguish between monetary motives ex ante and compensation ex post the release of the game. Indie developers thus emphasize the metonymic function of money as this not only indicates economic value and currency but also denotes a number of business practices that indie developers have otherwise avoided in their career planning as they believe these practices would restrain their creativity and skills.

The study contributes to the scholarship on video game development, the literature on creative industries, and the economic sociology literature examining the social meaning of money and how social norms and values are manifested in professional ideologies and practices.

This paper aims to investigate children’s experience as consumers of video games and associated digital communication technology, and the role this experience may play in their evolving senses of identity.

Qualitative depth interviews and discussions were conducted in a convenience sample consisting of 22 children of both genders aged 6-12 years, parents and video games company executives in the southwest of the UK. The fully transcribed data sets amounting to some 27,000 words were analysed using discourse analysis.

The findings revealed the heightened importance that the knowledge of video games plays in children’s strategies for negotiating their nascent sense of identity with regard to peer groups, family relationships and gender identity. Video games were not only a leisure activity but also a shared cultural resource that mediated personal and family relationships.

The study is based on an interpretive analysis of data sets from a small convenience sample, and is therefore not statistically generalisable.

This study has suggested that there may be positive benefits to children’s video game playing related to aspects of socialisation, emotional development and economic decision-making. An important caveat is that these benefits arise in the context of games as part of a loving and ordered family life with a balance of activities.

The study hints at the extent to which access to video games and associated digital communications technology has changed children’s experience of childhood and integrated them into the adult world in both positive and negative ways that were not available to previous generations.

This research addresses a gap in the field and adds to an understanding of the impact of video games on children’s development by drawing on children’s own expression of their subjective experience of games to engage with wider issues of relationships and self-identity.

Author information is one of the primary metadata elements for information access. While assigning “author(s)” has been relatively straightforward in library systems for textual resources, challenges have emerged in recording creatorship information for collaborative creative works, with surrogates erring on the side of caution and providing little information. This study aims to present improvements to the conceptual understanding of collaborative creatorship and relevant cataloging practice in video games.

The current study is a theoretical investigation of the authorship role of individuals in collaborative creative works, using video games as a case study. The investigation is based on the literature on video game user needs and authorship theory.

Reviews of literature present a disconnect between video game information user needs and currently available author information in library systems. Further analysis of the author/creator concept reveals insufficiencies in adopting auteur theory as the theory is applied to film. Exploration of access practices for other large collaborative creative products and an analysis of user tasks show potentially fruitful directions for future studies. This study recommends identifying primary roles that individuals adopt in video game creations and leveraging crowdsourced-creator information in library databases to enhance the visibility of author information for video games.

By incorporating authorship theories and research from various domains such as film studies, intellectual history and library and information science, this study provides interdisciplinary, theoretical considerations as well as practical suggestions to enhance the current cataloging practice.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the initial stages of a year to 18 month project to design and produce a peer designed video game for teenagers for use across Derbyshire Libraries.

The context is set with an overview of educational games focusing on the UK experience before examining both commercial off the shelf and bespoke games in schools, universities and libraries in the USA and UK.

The paper posits a specification it is believed will result in a game which is both educational and fun.

Describes the initial development of a peer designed game for young people.

This study aims to explore the effects of an alternative learning environment, such as the video game making (VGM) within science content, on computational thinking (CT) skills development and student performance.

A didactic intervention was performed for five weeks. Two student groups were taught the same computational concepts in two ways. One group was taught by constructing a video game within science content to practice science and computing curriculum while the other group constructed appropriately designed projects to practice only the computing curriculum. Additionally, the students constructed a pretest project before the beginning of the intervention and a post-test project after its end. Results were based on quantitative and qualitative code analysis and interviews from the students.

VGM within science content resulted in projects with more CT skills and also supported students to effectively apply their acquired coding skills, after the end of the intervention.

The results of this study suggest an interdisciplinary environment, such as the VGM within science content, which can effectively support CT skills development and computing curriculum.

Although VGM has been successfully applied to teach science content, this study explored the potential influence of this learning environment on CT skills development and coding fluency. Such interdisciplinary educational environments could be applied in the typical school settings to promote a plethora of skills and academic contents.

This paper aims to investigate public library staff engagement and perceptions of video games and video game services.

Quantitative and qualitative data on staff video game experiences, perceptions and confidence were collected through an online questionnaire.

The results indicate an overall positive perception of video games in public libraries, with 87% of the respondents supporting video games in public libraries. Video game players appear to think more positively about video games and have more general knowledge about them than non-players. They also appeared to be more confident in delivering related services and were more likely to be running gaming-related events. It was concluded that staff attitudes towards video games are not a barrier to their inclusion in public libraries, as found in previous research.

Encouraging staff engagement with video games may improve their knowledge and confidence in delivering video game services, although further research is required to confirm this. There is a potentially underserved population of those aged 46–84 years, nearly half of whom play video games. Evaluation of this potentially underserved population is an interesting topic for future research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this was the first survey of public library staff views towards video games in Aotearoa New Zealand, and it updates previous research in light of developments in gaming, gaming technology and the increased focus on public libraries as providers of digital technology and sites of community engagement.