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Growing up is hard to do? Managing Creativity within the Creative Game Industry

Stahl, Nelle and Bondesson, Anna (2008)
Department of Informatics
Abstract
Creativity is the essence of game design. Managing creativity within organizations can be thought of as being contradictory, and increased empirical research is made within this area, trying to understand the problematic with managing creativity along with more traditional management in business contexts. Even though the research area is substantial on this matter, there is still limited amount of literature focusing on managing creativity within creative industries, e.g. the game industry. This study is seen as a further contribution to that area. We studied the concept of creativity in the creative development process, put in relation to growth at three different levels; industry/context, organization/management, and team/individual. We... (More)
Creativity is the essence of game design. Managing creativity within organizations can be thought of as being contradictory, and increased empirical research is made within this area, trying to understand the problematic with managing creativity along with more traditional management in business contexts. Even though the research area is substantial on this matter, there is still limited amount of literature focusing on managing creativity within creative industries, e.g. the game industry. This study is seen as a further contribution to that area. We studied the concept of creativity in the creative development process, put in relation to growth at three different levels; industry/context, organization/management, and team/individual. We approached this with a qualitative study, based on interviews with respondents covering the entire Nordic game industry, which is the area in focus of this study. Findings showed a contrary result in relation to the theoretical foundation. Managing creativity within the growing industry and organizations, where external actors, e.g. publishers, have major influence and power to decide what type of games to be published or not, is not seen as a problematic act to handle. On the contrary, demands and restrictions frame the creativity, which is a benefit to the game developing companies and their work in the creative development process since it tells them “what’s allowed” and “what’s not”. The study did also show a positive relationship between financial budget and creativity. A larger financial support from e.g. publishers, positively influence the creativity since it brings more freedom to both the managers and the developing teams. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Stahl, Nelle and Bondesson, Anna
supervisor
organization
year
type
H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
subject
keywords
growth, Game Industry, Managing creativity, Game Development, Nordic region, Informatics, systems theory, Informatik, systemteori
language
English
id
1337673
date added to LUP
2008-06-13 00:00:00
date last changed
2010-08-03 10:51:48
@misc{1337673,
  abstract     = {{Creativity is the essence of game design. Managing creativity within organizations can be thought of as being contradictory, and increased empirical research is made within this area, trying to understand the problematic with managing creativity along with more traditional management in business contexts. Even though the research area is substantial on this matter, there is still limited amount of literature focusing on managing creativity within creative industries, e.g. the game industry. This study is seen as a further contribution to that area. We studied the concept of creativity in the creative development process, put in relation to growth at three different levels; industry/context, organization/management, and team/individual. We approached this with a qualitative study, based on interviews with respondents covering the entire Nordic game industry, which is the area in focus of this study. Findings showed a contrary result in relation to the theoretical foundation. Managing creativity within the growing industry and organizations, where external actors, e.g. publishers, have major influence and power to decide what type of games to be published or not, is not seen as a problematic act to handle. On the contrary, demands and restrictions frame the creativity, which is a benefit to the game developing companies and their work in the creative development process since it tells them “what’s allowed” and “what’s not”. The study did also show a positive relationship between financial budget and creativity. A larger financial support from e.g. publishers, positively influence the creativity since it brings more freedom to both the managers and the developing teams.}},
  author       = {{Stahl, Nelle and Bondesson, Anna}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Growing up is hard to do? Managing Creativity within the Creative Game Industry}},
  year         = {{2008}},
}