{"id":4160,"date":"2023-05-19T09:08:49","date_gmt":"2023-05-19T06:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogit.jamk.fi\/turbinaattori\/?p=4160"},"modified":"2024-02-09T15:38:59","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T12:38:59","slug":"the-playful-kraken-part-1-difficulty-of-starting-a-wide-topic-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogit.jamk.fi\/turbinaattori\/2023\/05\/19\/the-playful-kraken-part-1-difficulty-of-starting-a-wide-topic-research\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Playful Kraken\u201d – Part 1: Difficulty of Starting a Wide Topic Research\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The idea of \u201cThe Playful Kraken\u201d has been in my mind for several years. It has slowly grown into far too many related topics and questions. For that reason, I would like to write about the difficulty of getting a job in game development companies, and the incompatibilities of the current game education and the needs of the Game Industry companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The formal research topic is actually ”The coverage and distribution of game education in Finnish educational institutions compared to the Chips of Competence and the Game Industry as a whole, as well as the global game education range\/selection aka The Playful Kraken.” However, the difficulty lies in the definition of \u201cGame Industry\u201d (\u201cVideo Game Industry,\u201d 2022; Zackariasson & Wilson, 2012) which entails more than just development, marketing, and monetization of video games. Even specialized reports about the Game Industry (Team Neogames, 2021) seem to deal mostly with the game development side of the industry. In the broad sense the Game Industry would involve everything related to games from their development to enjoying them and to realizing diverse ways of game-related events and by-products so familiar to gamers. Of course, Esports (\u201cESports,\u201d 2022) is also a growing area that is easily defined under the same concept of the Game Industry even though it has been deemed an actual sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Valokuvia<\/a>
Game, games, and gaming aka How to fit everything under the same hypernym.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Consequently, the definition difficulty should be further investigated within the hypernym ’Game Industry’. The Game Industry in its broadest sense can be much more than just the basic definition of game development (\u201cVideo Game Development,\u201d 2022) or game production, which is usually the thing that is taught in many institutions around the world. The question then remains: is it even necessary to redefine the Game Industry term or is it just enough to map and compare the needs of game industry to the education provided? At least more in-depth concept analysis would be useful in deciding which term or terms to use and describe the phenomenon, whether there should be a different hypernym altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without a more detailed analysis, it is evident from Table 1 that different search engines provide different results when searching with the different combinations of the search terms \u201cgame\u201d, \u201cgames\u201d, \u201cgaming\u201d, \u201cindustry\u201d, and \u201csector\u201d. This is probably due to search engine optimizations. Theseus was the only search engine which seemed to identify all the variations of the word game in its searches. The search hits in Table 1 have been highlighted and stylized in the following way for each search engine and search term or combination of terms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n