Chains of Approval

The UK videogames market is the third largest by export after the USA and Japan, with the English Midlands one of its traditional hubs of development. This chapter charts how the early market in this area was underpinned by types of innovation that were more common to earlier modes of economic organization such as fraternal networks and cottage industries as opposed to the hyper-intensive capitalist formations found in high-tech areas such as Silicon Valley. Drawing on interviews with developers of the 1980s and 1990s and theory of the time and about the time, especially Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity , this chapter penlights how these networks of economic organization were formed through techniques and technologies of distribution made tangible through material ways of working that elided traditional education and drew upon informal and heuristic education such as hacking. The chapter concludes by showing that some of the practices (e.g. ‘crunch’) enacted within the historical and contemporary videogame market are closer to those found in the undistinguished past of the region including sweatshop labour on textile looms. As capital becomes more intensified, these practices are more common and become offshored or outsourced, as seen with the current penchant for protecting artificial intelligence training models through human vetting of harmful content. In sum, while the UK and English Midlands’ videogame market is a point of pride in the political and creative realm, the lessons gleaned from the past and the present should not elide what it means to be human in the beam of new media technologies.