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Paper short abstract

Dundee’s games history reveals a lasting paradox: community-rooted digital creativity repeatedly flourishes alongside extractive labor, external ownership, and precarity. Rather than a linear transition, the city’s trajectory reflects a ch’ixi coexistence of incompatible futures held in tension.

Paper long abstract

Over recent decades, Dundee has become known for its experiments in digital creativity while still carrying with it several legacies of its earlier industrial regimes. Repeatedly, the city has generated collaborative, community-rooted forms of innovation and future-imagining that reshape its economic and cultural trajectory, while remaining embedded in extractive labour regimes, external ownership, and accumulation logics (Bozdog, 2022; Tomlison, 2014). Rather than resolving into a clear sociotechnical developmental path, Dundee’s history is marked by the durable coexistence of autonomy and dependency, creativity and extraction, care and disposability.

We make this paradox evident by analysing two empirical vignettes. First, during the 1980s, when informal collaborative computer clubs flourished, embedded in low-wage electronics manufacturing for multinational firms such as Timex and Michelin. These grassroots practices reimagined and reoriented the city’s future, giving rise to globally successful studios such as DMA Design. Second, currently, a similar configuration persists as developer collectives and care-oriented practices coexist with local incarnations (eg, Rockstar) of a global games industry characterised by crunch culture, speculative investment, and mass layoffs.

Such persistence challenges sociotechnical transition models that assume a directional movement toward a stabilized regime (eg, Geels, 2004; Sovacool & Hess, 2017). To interpret this paradox, the paper mobilises Silvia Cusicanqui’s concept of the ch’ixi, understood as the unresolved coexistence of incompatible logics that remain entangled without synthesis (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018). Read through ch’ixi, Dundee’s video games industry trajectory does not represent a transition toward a purified “alternative future,” but the persistent negotiation of incompatible futures held in tension.