Part A. We will conduct in-depth interviews with six types of informants: 1) owners, managers, and marketers in the game industries, 2) organizers of professional bodies of the game industries, 3) creative workers (game artists, designers, and programmers) and lower level employees (e.g. game-masters) in game companies, 4) owners and managers of cybercafés and game arcades, 5) editors of trade journals and game magazines, 6) key figures in HK’s pop cultural industries. We aim to interview around 40 such informants in HK. We will also conduct 40 interviews in China. Informants will include, in addition to the six categories, officials and policy makers who are responsible for regulating the industries.
The informants will be selected through criteria including their position, their influence in the game industries, and evaluation by their peers. The first informants will be those recruited from the already existing networks of the PI and Co-Is. By means of snow-ball sampling, we will broaden our network and recruit additional informants. The interviews will be guided by grounded analysis methods. We will set up initial guideline questions for the interviews, but the questions will be revised and adjusted as we proceed.
Part B. Five focus group interview panels will be conducted in HK and another five in China. The PI and Co-Is will moderate the panels. Each panel will be constituted by 8 participants from between 4 to 6 different creative industries. The panels feature different types of participants: creative workers (2 panels), high level management, middle and lower level workers, and veteran consumers. The interview questions of the focused groups will aim at creative clustering potentials, strategies, and problems. The participants will be paid an honorarium.
(7th months – 18th months)