Artists as Assets: Labor and Capital in the Unity Asset Store

To celebrate the release of Issue 4 of the VGA Reader, we will be featuring one article from the new volume with every zine for the foreseeable future. Click through to see the second article, currently hosted by Amherst College Press and available open source on fulcrum.org.

“The Unity Asset Store sells amateur designers and artists a promise of being able to participate in an idealized, rationalized vision of how the game design industry operates, riffing on a dream to distinguish themselves as artists. Yet in order to sell this vision to aspiring game designers, Unity and the Asset Store depend on marketing the content created by amateur artists in ways that require the artists to essentially package their work as labor and to mask their unique identities as artists.”

Color, Line and Form at SAAM Arcade

Without diving into the inscrutable world of ludology, what can an average person expect to find if they boil down a video game into its most basic forms? Code, certainly. Color, perhaps. But what about fun?