EXPLORING VIDEO-GAME PRODUCTION’S CONTINGENCY ON LIVE-STREAMING PLATFORMS: THE CASE OF TWITCH

This article studies the cultural contingency of video-game production on Amazon’s live-streaming platform, Twitch. It looks at this phenomenon from a political-economic perspective to unearth Twitch’s platformisation strategy to better understand what it means for the video-game industry. Platformisation signifies the infrastructural embeddedness of platforms, supported by a business strategy of expanding beyond their services’ boundaries to standardise appropriation, processing and exploitation of data, resulting in a dependency of content creators on digital platforms. Subsequently, we wish to grasp what dependencies are created and how it is made possible. We argue that Twitch is transforming into an integral part of the video-game production cycle by expanding its services to every stage of a game’s life cycle. Consequently, game developers are incentivised to apply these features in their game design, thus creating an economic feedback loop that a) aspires to increase user acquisition, retention and revenue, b) locks-in game developers and viewers alike, and c) “platformises” the gaming experience.

On breaking with

It is through voice that oftentimes individuals find themselves breaking with conventions and systematically ingrained injustices. In the recent literature in the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary voice studies, the phenomenon of voicing has been projected as a powerful process, across cultures, to represent human agency at its most potent, and this article is a critical discussion on this very uniqueness of voicing in relation to social equity, corporeality and cultural value. The author, a female singer-researcher of Karnatik music of South India, unpacks the burdens and privileges of voice in the light of cultural contingency, global mobility and interculturality. Following a discussion encompassing literature and theories on voice, historical ideas of voice and feminist critiques on voice and the voicing female body from a South Indian angle, the author proposes a Pentagonal Entanglement framework for equitable engagement with the voice ‐ across scenarios and cultures, to critically address the socially pressing issues of our time through the medium of voice.

Intellectual Property’s Queer Turn

Intellectual property is getting queerer. Although intellectual property is most often associated with theories of economic rationality or romantic individualism, there are increasingly prominent strands of IP theory that reflect the insights of queer theory. Although IP and queer theory are rarely in direct conversation, this chapter shows several nascent intersections between these two fields, including: the cultural contingency of creativity, the unpredictable trajectories of social regulation, and the co-constitutive nature of intellectual life and material culture. IP theory increasingly understands that the cultural discourse shapes the distribution of wealth, happiness, and political power in the physical world, and vice versa. This chapter emphasizes both the broad sociocultural implications of IP’s regulatory interventions and the underappreciated jurisprudential value of queer theory.

Signaling effects and the role of culture: movies in international auxiliary channels

Purpose Given the high uncertainty in the quality perception of experiential products, manufacturers use signals to influence consumers’ decisions. In the movie industry, literature shows that performance of the main channel (e.g. cinema) strongly influences the performance of auxiliary channels (e.g. DVDs). The success of a movie in the home country is also to be resonated by its good performance in host countries. However, the cultural contingency of these success-breeds-success (SBS) effects has not been examined. This paper aims to test the influence of cultural values on the SBS effects across channels and countries. Design/methodology/approach Borrowing concepts from the signaling literature and analyzing DVD sales data from six international markets using a multilevel mixed-effects model, the study finds that culture plays a significant role to influence both SBS effects. Findings In countries with low power distance, short-term orientation and high indulgence, consumers who purchase from auxiliary channels are more likely to be influenced by the box office performance of movies. Meanwhile, cultural distance between the home and host nations significantly decreases the cross-national SBS effect. Research limitations/implications The findings are likely to be generalized to online auxiliary channels of movies, but empirical testing is required to ensure that no major adaptation is required in the process. Future research can also extend the framework of this paper to include more countries into the analysis and investigate cultural variables beyond Hofstede’s dimensions. Practical implications This paper suggests that the SBS effects may vary across nations. When managers plan for the sequential distributions of experiential products, the cultural values of target markets should be considered to decrease the uncertainty in sales prediction. Originality/value This paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating the international auxiliary channels of movies and incorporating cultural values into the framework of sequential distributions. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to test the links between the main and auxiliary channels from an international marketing perspective.

Punishment, Youth Justice and Cultural Contingency: Towards a Balanced Approach

Reflecting developments in the broader penological realm, accounts have been advanced over the last number of decades about a ‘punitive turn’ in the youth justice systems of Western democracies. Against the background of this work, this project seeks to identify convergent and divergent trends in the youth justice systems of England, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as well as the rationalities and discourses animating these. The results lend support to research emphasising the continued salience of national, regional and local factors on penal outcomes but also suggest the need to steer an analytical path somewhere between nomothetic (convergent) and idiographic (divergent) accounts.