UC Irvine

This text is the result of years of ethnographic fieldwork among market research analysts at XPG [pseudonym]—a small firm that specialized in collecting, processing, and reporting on consumer data for the videogame industry. Acting as a participant-observer at XPG, I examined the socio-technical processes through which large videogame publishers came to know their audiences, weigh their opinions and desires, and develop new products for them. In the pages below, I alternately explore the perspectives and practices of professional consumer analysts, entertainment capitalists, and outspoken consumers of games, showing how the dynamic relationships between such actors help constitute the warp and weft of the mass-market gaming scene, a variegated cultural context that connects and divides people across the globe. More broadly, this text represents an ethnography of popular demand, showing how players’ demands were incited, expressed, elaborated, interpreted, performed, and accounted for both in public gamer discourse and behind the closed doors of the videogame industry. My aim in this approach is to show how and why certain demands come to matter for businesses—and others do not. Along the way, I encounter myriad complications to the notion of popular demand, detailing how players’ demands are historically situated (Chapter 1), relational (Chapter 2), multiple (Chapter 3), and cyclical (Chapter 4). Taken as a whole, I argue for a reconsideration of demand and its role in capitalism, one that understands capitalists as more than rational, profit-maximizing machines responding to demand automatically as if it were merely a market “force” or “pressure.” Rather, I depict capitalists as thickly enmeshed in tangles of collective judgments which they recognize, incite, and attempt to shape, but never fully control. Similarly, I argue for a reconsideration of videogames as a medium, showing how their current instantiation as mass-market, viral entertainment—in the style of Hollywood blockbusters—differs greatly from scholarly understandings of videogames as text, as rule-based systems, or as virtual worlds. Rather, as viral products, I describe how the point of mass-market videogames is to propagate, generate, mutate, connect, and trigger the deeply held feelings, associations, and fantasies that we share in common.