Alternative Gamemaking Tools as Grassroots Platforms

Videogame production provides a unique site to consider dominant and alternative logics of platformisation. Despite the well-understood modes of value extraction that platformisation normalises, the tools of videogame production are also nonetheless more accessible than ever before. Whereas once gamemaking required extensive technical skills and custom-made software, a vast ecosystem of commercial and non-commercial gamemaking tools have emerged over the past 15 years that provide alternative and contested notions of videogame development skillsets and aesthetics. This chapter contrasts the logics of dominant commercial game engines and alternative gamemaking tools to suggest the notion of grassroots platforms as a way to speculate other forms of platform governance of cultural production beyond the dominant models of platform capitalism.