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Linguistic Capital and Development Capital in a Network of Cultural Producers: Mutually Valuing Peer Groups in the ‘Interactive Fiction’ Retrogaming Scene

Allington, Daniel

Authors

Daniel Allington



Abstract

© The Author(s) 2015. This article reports on a mixed-methods study of the cultural valuing of ‘interactive fiction’ or ‘text adventure games’: a formerly commercial videogame genre sometimes associated with electronic literature but here argued to be best understood in context of the under-researched phenomenon of ‘retrogaming’ or ‘old school gaming’. It is argued that a model for the study of retrogaming scenes is provided in Lena and Peterson’s account of ‘traditionalist’ musical genres, and that these in turn exhibit similarities with Bourdieu’s ‘field of restricted production’. On the basis of qualitative analysis of interviews and documents and quantitative analysis of valuing behaviour on a website used by the interactive fiction community, it is proposed that entrance into the mutually-valuing peer group of interactive fiction developers is facilitated by possession of two intangible resources: linguistic capital (in the form of proficiency in Standard English) and development capital (in the form of expertise with programming languages specific to the production of interactive fiction), where development capital is a new concept that may be extensible to other technically-oriented digital cultures (for example, the working cultures of professional software developers and the communities that form around open source projects). Expressions of value in the form of star ratings were collected procedurally through data scraping, and represented as a directed graph. Seidman’s k-core was innovatively used as an instrument for detecting mutually-valuing peer groups within that graph. It is argued that this methodology has general application for the study of cultural value and its production within social networks (both online and off), including networks associated with more established cultural fields such as art and literature.

Citation

Allington, D. (2016). Linguistic Capital and Development Capital in a Network of Cultural Producers: Mutually Valuing Peer Groups in the ‘Interactive Fiction’ Retrogaming Scene. Cultural Sociology, 10(2), 267-286. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975515598333

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 1, 2015
Online Publication Date Sep 2, 2015
Publication Date Jan 1, 2016
Deposit Date Jan 19, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Cultural Sociology
Print ISSN 1749-9755
Electronic ISSN 1749-9763
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 10
Issue 2
Pages 267-286
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975515598333
Keywords capitals, linguistic capital, development capital, cultural production, cultural value, cultural valuing, fields, field theory, game developers, gaming, interactive fiction, k-cores, programming, social network analysis, methodology
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/911261
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1749975515598333

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