Collusion: Mapping the Interplay Between Paid and Unpaid Labourers in the Digital Games Industry

Julian Kücklich's paper argues that digital game production can be understood as a game itself, played among heterogeneous actors on a distributed playing field that spans both real and virtual spaces. Drawing a structural parallel between the gamespace of digital games and the spaces in which they are produced, the author contends that both are shaped by topological constraints that make some moves possible and others impossible, and both undergo continual processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Rather than describing developers, publishers, and players as prosumers or participatory audiences, the paper identifies them as players whose roles in production are highly contingent and subject to shifting conditions.

The central analytical claim is that production unfolds as a struggle between "luditude" and the imperial power of gaming capital, a conflict over who writes the rules of digital games production and who is able to break them. The paper observes that actors at the periphery, such as workers in manufacturing plants that build the electronic components of games consoles, have little capacity to negotiate the rules that govern them, while actors at the centres of the field can shape rule sets to their advantage. Intellectual property regimes, regulatory frameworks, and technological standards are depicted as imperfectly integrated, producing friction that introduces instability into the system.

The paper further argues that production is a high-risk endeavour for all participants, though risk is unevenly distributed, flowing from centre to periphery. This asymmetry provides a rationale for rule-breaking, which the author frames as a politicised concept connected to globalised production, the transformation of play into labour, and human subjectivity in technologised cultural settings. The paper concludes that players in this field face a choice among collusion, elusion, and delusion.