About the Author

Stefan Werning

E-Mail: s.werning@uu.nl

Stefan Werning is an Associate Professor for Digital Media and Game Studies at Utrecht University, where he co-coordinates the focus area Game Research and organizes the annual Game Research summer school. He obtained his PhD in media studies (2010) at Bonn University (Germany) and received his venia legendi at Bayreuth University (Germany) in 2015. Stefan has been a visiting scholar (2005) and fellow (2006–2010) at the program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Moreover, he has worked in the digital games industry while completing his PhD research, most notably at Codemasters (2005) and Nintendo of Europe (2007–09).

Contributions by Author: Stefan Werning

Issue 8
game distribution
media ontology
platformization
comparative content analysis
software affordances

Itch.io and the One-Dollar-Game

How Distribution Platforms Affect the Ontology of (Games as) a Medium

The article at hand investigates the formal and media ontological implications of digital distribution by analyzing how the independent game publishing platform Itch.io facilitated and shaped ‘the one-dollar game’ as a product category and emergent form of cultural expression. Distribution has been an important but mostly overlooked aspect of the “media identity” [1] of (digital) games from the beginning. In the early days, playing and (re-)writing games were […]