The Chinese Room

Production Pipelines as Actor-Networks: Rethinking the Game Studio as a Technological Platform

This paper proposes that the game studio's production pipeline should be understood as an Actor-Network, and that the studio itself functions as a technological platform shaped by material production realities, industry structures, and embedded values.

• The paper reframes the game studio's production pipeline as an Actor-Network drawing on Bruno Latour, arguing that human and technological mediators (third-party engines, middleware, Lean management) actively transform the ideas and assets they carry rather than merely passing them along.
• The authors position the work as a bridge between production studies and platform studies, responding to calls within game studies for an approach that connects industrial context with platform analysis.
• Methodologically, the study combines production cultures research (drawing on John Caldwell and Sherry Ortner) with interviews with triple-A and independent designers and case studies of Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly, 2014) and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015).