Managing Projects in a Games Factory: Temporality and Practices

The online gaming world is growing voraciously and so too is the wider market for computer games which now exceeds the annual global revenues of cinema. Even so, we have only a limited scholarly understanding of how games studios produce games. Games projects require particular attention because their context is unique. We aim to elucidate the games development process from a time perspective and suggest ways of managing it. We argue that a games project is characterised by a compound of temporal rhythms that emanate from the individual, team, company, industry, nation, inter-nation and marketplace levels. Project managers need to take account of these 'inner' and 'outer' temporal rhythms since they can affect development culture and project chronology.