Early Game Developer Communities in Switzerland
This project is part of the interdisciplinary project Confoederatio Ludens (SNSF Sinergia) that aims to shed light on the vastly under-researched topic of Swiss game design and development culture from the past until now.
Confoederatio Ludens is an interdisciplinary project by researchers at multiple Swiss universities (ZHdK, UNIL, UNIBE, HKB). It features 5 PhD-candidates with their respective sub-projects and topics, such as: (1) The History of Smaky, (2) The Construction of Gender – a gender history of the early Swiss games culture, (3) History of Visual Design of Early Swiss Video Games and (4) A Diachronic Look at Swiss Developers Community and the PhD-project that I will be conducting: Early Game Developer Communities in Switzerland.
The aim of this PhD project is to reconstruct the beginning of the home computer scene in the whole of Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s and to document how games were made during that time, examining the organizational tools and formal and informal networks Swiss game developers relied on. In this interdisciplinary research, qualitative interviews are being conducted with key figures in the early Swiss game development scene and then analyzed. The interviews focus on the interconnections between developer communities in Switzerland and the broader transnational context. Through evaluation of the interviews, both professional and personal networks will be identified. Social network analysis of these networks will be used to find existing communities. Categories for the existing communities and their function will then be inferred. Furthermore the project will provide an analysis of technologies that emerged out of these communities.