Keynote  Speakers

Automation and Inequality in Videogame Production

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Abstract:
Recent advances in AI techniques for generating and manipulating text, images and other media cast creative industries as the last stand against automation and technological unemployment. Some experts and commentators reassure the public that generative AI can only produce novelty within set parameters and that true creativity is achievable only through the conduit of human consciousness - where personhood channels experience into expression. This way of thinking emphasises 'complementarity', where automated systems augment instead of replace human creativity. Yet, a growing number of complementary tasks seem to draw on creative workers' capacities for living and feeling not to innovate or even supervise, but to iterate on machinic outputs. Automated forms of videogame production must be maintained by workers who use embodied and tacit knowledge to prompt content and bridge processes that are hard to codify and compute. Unlike AI art practices that prioritise co-creation with humans, industrial practices require humans to complement AI systems in routine and repetitive ways. Automation may be stratifying creativity into roles that extol some workers as persons while exploiting other workers as apparatuses – compounding existing race, class, and gender stratification in the games industry and threatening to undo the sector's efforts towards equity, diversity, and inclusion. Drawing on humanities research on creative labour, this talk urges game researchers to consider how automation tools might be shaped around human values to build more inclusive and equitable communities.

Bio:

Aleena Chia is Lecturer in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She uses ethnographic and textual approaches to research creativity and innovation practices in game development and computational wellness. Her research on games investigates the passionate work of hobbyists and automation of creative labour through computational techniques. Her work on wellness examines disconnection from social media and lucid dreaming as a form of biohacking. In 2022, Dr Chia co-edited a special issue on Politicizing Agency in Digital Play after Humanism in Convergence, the edited collection Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman and Littlefield), and co-authored the multigraph Technopharmacology (University of Minnesota Press / Meson Press). Her work is published in Television and New Media, Internet Policy Review, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Fandom Studies, and American Behavioral Scientist, among others. Before joining Goldsmiths, Aleena was a tenure track assistant professor at Simon Fraser University, postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, and PhD intern at Microsoft Research New England.