Opening the Production Pipeline: Unruly Creators

This paper examines how game developers increasingly depend on the voluntary creative labour of fan content creators, using an ethnographic account of Auran, an Australian PC game developer, and its work on the train simulation Trainz between mid-2000 and 2004. Its central argument is that this arrangement cannot be reduced to the exploitation of unknowing fans as free labour. Fans are shown to be well aware of these practices and to participate in them as sophisticated practitioners, and the entanglements between proprietary and non-proprietary, commercial and non-commercial activity are presented as unavoidable rather than as a simple corporate appropriation of fandom.

The collaboration was adopted largely as a contingent response to weak sales and rising art production costs, and Auran integrated third-party fan content into official Trainz releases, including Ultimate Trainz Collection (2002) and Trainz Railroad Simulator 2004. The third-party program for the 2004 release drew on dozens of creators, with 35 contributing content to the CD release, and it produced high-quality assets. However, the program also revealed serious strains: developers struggled to provide adequate support and early builds, deadlines conflicted with the weekend hobby schedules of volunteers, and some creators abandoned their work or withdrew. Creators' complaints about inadequate information and tools were documented in forum posts and emails.

Auran subsequently disbanded the broad third-party group and replaced it with a Trainz Partnership Scheme that offers direct support only to a smaller, selected tier of creators, a shift the paper characterises as the company acting as gatekeeper to the platform. Fan responses were mixed, ranging from disappointment to resignation, and the author stresses that the fan community holds no single view, since motivations range from passion for trains to social status and commercial opportunity.

The paper concludes that the central difficulty is organisational: ad hoc fan creation networks do not fit comfortably within corporate project schedules, and Auran has yet to fundamentally reorganise its development processes to support such collaborative work.