Nick Dyer-Witheford teaches in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois Press, 1999), and, with Stephen Kline and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing: (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

Abstract

The Canadian Video and Computer Game Industry

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 is a summary of a three-year SSHRC funded study describing the Canadian digital play industry.