Prosumption in the Game Dev Community

I was reading a post on a classmate’s blog who ranted briefly about their experience as a photographer in participatory culture on the internet, and it inspired me to think about it from the perspective of the community I align with: Game developers.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Reddit browsing game development content, including but not limited to: devlogs, progress gifs, promotional videos, and games themselves. I like to see what creative projects or solutions people come up with, and oftentimes they will proudly share how it was done.

I have done this myself, sharing a custom physics solution to an issue with Unity’s default tilemap editor. It remains one of my most well received posts on Twitter, although I suppose less than 20 likes really isn’t anything to brag about.

It is heartwarming to see developers compliment other devs, give constructive feedback on, and remark over the progress people have made as they post updates on Twitter or Reddit. There is also a lot of encouragement to keep going, interlaced with sage advice on how to not get burnt out by overexerting yourself.

While validation in the form of likes and upvotes is good and all (and likely a very good motivator to post frequent, eye-catching updates), developers are simultaneously trying to advertise their game.

Producing a quality game deserving of financial compensation takes a profusion of time and effort; I’m sure many find it hard to keep up with social media on top of development. In addition, there are some phases of development in which there is nothing flashy to show.

I think a lot of individuals have different motivations for making games- To feel validated by likes on social media? To make money? To simply show somebody a good time? All of these still rely on social media presence and engaging in participatory culture, even if you don’t care about money. To get people to play your game, you have to put it out there constantly.

Well, I forgot where I was going with this but it was nice to get my thoughts out there. Thanks for reading, and in the spirit of this post I think you should go kill 10 minutes playing a game I made.

-Doug