ISSN: 0845-4450 Issue 31
Introduction
The vernacular form of digital poetics is, surely, the videogame. Invented in the 1970s as a pastime of bored Pentagon researchers, this whimsical creation has over thirty years become the basis of one of the fastest growing of advanced capitalism’s cultural industries. This industry’s global revenues of some $28 billion match cinema’s box-office take, even if not its ancillary streams. Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, Halo and Everquest are icons of popular entertainment in North America, Europe, and Japan, and are rapidly spreading more widely around the planet; we have seen sports video-¬games played in wooden bazaar stalls by impoverished children in the old Islamic quarter of Cairo, bootlegged copies of Halo 2 sold (at a tenth the price of originals) in underground bazaars of Delhi, and crowds of hundreds logging-on for virtual combat in cavernous Chinese gaming halls. Not only are digital games serious competitors with movies and music in the world-market of popular entertainment, but they are increasingly integrated with them in synergistic media empires. It is quite possible that, just as today we can see the 18th century novel as a cultural invention peculiarly adequate to bourgeois subjectivities of an emergent mercantile society, and television and film as vital components of 20th century Fordist consumerism, so video and computer games will eventually be recognized as the media specifically exemplary of 21st century networked global capitalism.
This paper—a summary of a three-year SSHRC funded study—describes the Canadian digital play industry. Canada is home to some world-renowned game development companies; several multinational game makers operate Canadian studios; Montreal and Vancouver are internationally recognized as hubs of game industry; and Canadians are avid consumers of interactive games. All this makes computer and video game development an undoubted Canadian success story. By the same token, however, Canadian game developers participate in the many controversies—about violent content, sexism, labor conditions and other issues—that attend this new digital cultural complex. Before we review the promise and the problems of Canada’s latest creative industry it may, however, be useful to offer a quick overview of how the digital games business works.