The Assemblage of Peripheral Game Development: A Case Study of Dundee

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of a video game development cluster/ecosystem in a relatively peripheral city in Scotland (Dundee). While clusters or ecosystems in the cultural and creative industries are often studied through economic geography or managerial lenses, focusing on agglomeration and formal processes, this paper adopts concepts from Assemblage Theory to explore the complex socio-material relations that constitute a cluster, including its emergence, stabilisation and transformation. Through the qualitative analysis of a corpus of public documents, the paper begins to trace some of the key components that have assembled to form Dundee's video game industrial ecosystem. Findings reveal an assemblage characterised by a sort of bottom-up transformation which is in part driven by industrial legacies of the city, and a constant recombination of expressive and material resources and where it is evident the role of actors (like universities) that connect formal and informal actors. The study contributes to the literature in explaining the peripheral innovation ecosystems of video games and challenging top- down models of cluster/hub understanding.