Creating Video Games in Barcelona: Production Field and Belonging

This paper examines video game production in Barcelona through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the field, building on Brendan Keogh's proposal to think beyond the "industry" and toward a broader field of production. Its central aim is to understand the meanings and experiences of belonging among creators within an independent studio with significant female participation. The authors draw on Nira Yuval-Davis's distinction between the politics of belonging, which determines who counts as part of a field, and belonging itself, the personal emotions and values people experience on the margins or at the center of a social space.

The study is based on ethnographic research with Frog Studio, an indie team that took part in a Barcelona video game incubator between May and October 2024. The first author attended sprint reviews, incubator events, and international and local industry conferences, kept a field diary, and conducted in-depth interviews with three core members: an artist and co-founder, a programmer and co-founder, and a producer. The authors note that data analysis was still in progress at the time of writing, so the findings are preliminary.

Reported context indicates that Barcelona's sector combines major subsidiaries such as Ubisoft and Larian Studios with more than 200 independent studios, 92 of which lack formal fiscal recognition. Economically, only 12 percent of these companies earn over €2 million annually, while 60 percent earn no more than €200,000. The authors argue that the sector is characterized by tension between heteronomous (commercial) and autonomous (artistic) principles, with state policy leaning toward the economic framing of games.

The core finding is that the field is in a process of informalization that admits creators with non-traditional backgrounds, such as a nurse, a travel agency owner, and a computer technician in the studio's core team. Yet this openness generates uncertainty, and members of Frog Studio described feeling on the periphery of development, with one participant expressing frustration at the masculinized culture of hegemonic production.