Tracing the Political Economy of the Microgame

The document analyzes the political economy of the "microgame," tracing its historical evolution and cultural function across nearly fifty years of commercial games marketing, serious games research, and contemporary game development funding. The central thesis posits that the microgame, characterized by its intentionally small-scale design and reliance on explicit limits, serves as a crucial lens for understanding how aesthetic aims and material constraints have shaped cultural expectations about commercial game design's systemic minimum. The paper distinguishes the microgame from the more consistently defined "minigame," arguing that the former exists in tension with the dominant cultural conception of games as a scalable form.

The analysis tracks the term's usage from 1970s wargaming and early 1980s serious games to contemporary commercial videogame criticism. While prior scholarship on microgames primarily focused on their efficacy as training tools in professional settings, this paper expands the scope to examine the cultural function of the term itself and how it relates to broader efforts to define, develop, and sell microgames. It highlights how disparate conceptualizations of microgames converge in their preoccupation with managing and presenting strictly limited spatial, technological, financial, and temporal resources.

To further contextualize these entangled histories, the paper draws on interdisciplinary scholarship concerning knowledge production, new media, and contemporary capitalism, particularly focusing on the concepts of "system" and "scale." This broader scalar turn allows for an understanding of videogame form's conceptual language through the economic conditions of contemporary technoculture, including the rise of "mini-apps" on platforms like WeChat. The document also examines a present-day invocation of the microgame within Australian games funding, using the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI)'s 2025 callout for microgames as a local case study to explore how institutional pressures inform local games production and the term's perceived value in non-commercial contexts. Ultimately, the paper argues that the language of scale offers an underexamined way to understand how videogames became culturally legible against the ideological backdrop of neoliberalism.