“One Place for All the Ways We Play”: The Corporate Sociotechnical Imaginary of  Cloud Game Streaming

Willett, Sean R. M.

“One Place for All the Ways We Play”: The Corporate Sociotechnical Imaginary of Cloud Game Streaming

dc.contributor.advisor	Hogan, Mél
dc.contributor.author	Willett, Sean R. M.
dc.contributor.committeemember	Harvey, Alison
dc.contributor.committeemember	Hogan, Mél
dc.contributor.committeemember	Pierson, Ryan
dc.date	2019-11
dc.date.accessioned	2019-08-19T20:22:55Z
dc.date.available	2019-08-19T20:22:55Z
dc.date.issued	2019-08-16
dc.description.abstract	Labeled ‘the future of gaming’ by platform owners and members of the enthusiast press, cloud game streaming is an emerging technology that is drawing investment from companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. While cloud gaming would benefit these companies by giving them more control over their platforms, the technology has a vulnerability to infrastructure failure that is absent in traditional methods of playing digital games. This thesis uses the concept of the corporate sociotechnical imaginary — a co-produced ordering of social life that ties an emancipatory vision of the future to a corporate product or service — in order to understand the way platform owners are attempting to transcend that vulnerability to infrastructural failure and position cloud gaming within the cultural hegemony. This is done by conducting close readings of press conferences made by three platform owners with cloud gaming services (OnLive, Nvidia, and Google) along with articles written by members of the enthusiast press. The corporate sociotechnical imaginary surrounding cloud streaming services associates this technology with a future where playing digital games is more convenient, more financially accessible, and free of platform-based restrictions — without any sacrifices to the authenticity of the gameplay experience. By contextualizing this imaginary within a political economic framework, this thesis argues this sociotechnical imaginary is being used to obfuscate the economic and infrastructural consequences of cloud gaming, and calls for scholars to imagine alternate futures for the digital game industry.	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Willett, S. R. M. (2019). “One Place for All the Ways We Play”: The Corporate Sociotechnical Imaginary of Cloud Game Streaming (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/36831
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1880/110744
dc.language.iso	eng	en_US
dc.publisher.faculty	Arts	en_US
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary	en
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.	en_US
dc.subject	digital games	en_US
dc.subject	video games	en_US
dc.subject	infrastructure	en_US
dc.subject	media	en_US
dc.subject	political economy	en_US
dc.subject	critical theory	en_US
dc.subject	imaginaries	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Information Science	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Mass Communications	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Economics--Theory	en_US
dc.title	“One Place for All the Ways We Play”: The Corporate Sociotechnical Imaginary of Cloud Game Streaming	en_US
dc.type	master thesis	en_US
thesis.degree.discipline	Communication and Media Studies	en_US
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary	en_US
thesis.degree.name	Master of Arts (MA)	en_US
ucalgary.item.requestcopy	true	en_US