Findings Highlights

The drawings from two participants suggest disparate experiences at Spelkollektivet in terms of the work-entertainment balance as well as the perception of the community. But on a more abstract level, there are some common traits to be found in the community.

Same Roof, Different Life

Despite sharing the same working and living space day and night, the residents at Spelkollektivet seem to have the freedom and rich options of activities to organize their living style. It is possible to be a workaholic or a party queen or both. This is in stark contrast with what Jonathan Blow probably had in mind: “a dystopian communist” commune lack of color and variety.

Steps Away from Social Life

One thing that stands out to me the most is the overwhelming amount of activities in the house. Indie devs always give me the impression of working alone in a bedroom, completely stripped out of social life like Eric Barone did when making Stardrew Valley (Schreier, 2017) or the life of devs documented in Indie Game: The Movie (Swirsky & Pajot, 2012). Thus, my natural thought was everyone would work as much as they can and only have some leisure over mealtime, maybe occasionally throw a weekend party but that is as far as it could go. Instead, plenty of people have chosen to organize or participate in various interest groups and events. There are indeed Homies who prefer to go full throttle at work. But even some of them would also show up at special events such as a live-action version of Baba is You. These activities are foundational to the vibrant atmosphere at Spelkollektivet and simultaneously cultivate a sense of community. At Spelkollektivet, being indie does not mean being alone anymore.

Supportive of Each Other

If you ask an indie what is the upside of doing design, programming, and art all in one, they would probably tell you that they don’t have the communication cost and the confusion and friction between team members that come with it. Indeed, the disagreement and conflict inside the team in an AAA studio is a recurring theme presented in the insider stories of what went wrong inside the studio.

Spelkollektivet, on the other hand, not only houses the indies looking to get away from that trouble but offers an easy environment to get all the supportive input from other creative minds. Having their own project takes away the conflict of interest between them while living in the same space increases the opportunities for supporting each other. As a result, they are regularly inspiring and sharing feedback with others at SGDC and in daily conversations.

Project Metadata

This project is the output of the course Game Development Field Study. The aim of the course is to put the students in the field, namely a game studio, have them observe the game development work going on in its natural setting, and conduct a game development research on it. In my case, I chose Spelkollektivet, a co-living space for indie devs, as my ethnographic field study object and spent an unforgettable two months there.

Introduction

Imagine living in a community where tens of indie devs would work and live together 24/7 with rich and diverse activities put together by the house or other Homies (A name the residents in the house like to refer to each other as), plus having food and everything else covered by the house at an indie-friendly price of 600 euros a month. Sounds heavenly for indies right? Indeed, that is also the reaction of the well-known game designer Jonathan Blow when he heard about it. And the same utopian idea also drove me to spend two months there at Spelkollektivet to see what life there is really like.

Research Questions

This report resulted from my two-month research at Spelkollektivet, an attempt to describe and understand the general working and living experience at Spelkollektivet. The research seeks to answer a central question:

• What is it like to work and live at Spelkollektivet?.

This central question could be further broken down into several subquestions for a refined understanding of the experience at Spelkollektivet:

• What is the working and living experience of a designer/programmer/artist/non-game-dev people at Spelkollketivet?

Method Highlights

A two-section interview is designed to ask the residents at Spelkollektivet about their working and living experience. The first section asks about the general background information of the interviewee for contextualizing the answers in the second section. They involve the interviewee’s experience in making games, their perceived role of themselves in making games as well as how long they have stayed at Spelkollektivet. These questions match the sampling strategy the study uses, which groups the residents by several characteristics such as gender, nationality, game/non-game developer, role(s) in development, time spent at Spelkollektivet, and their experience level in game development. The goal is to collect participants from as diverse combinations as possible.

The second section asks the participant to draw a picture as a response to the question “What is the working and living experience as a game/non-game developer at Spelkollektivet?”

Using drawings to elicit responses is also used in another research (“Lehtonen, M. J., Ainamo, A., & Harviainen, J. (2020). The four faces of creative industries: visualizing the game industry ecosystem in Helsinki and Tokyo. Industry and Innovation, 27(9), 1062-1087. https://doi.org/10.1080/13662716.2019.1676704” on page 14) where the game developers in Helsinki and Tokyo were asked to draw their view of the ecosystem of the local game companies. The method received revealing results and mitigated some common issues plaguing traditional interviewing such as the innate power imbalance between the researcher and the interviewee that limits and suppresses the freedom of expression of the interviewee.

After the interviewee finished their drawings, I decoded the drawings with clarification from the interviewee when deemed necessary.