Latin America's New Cultural Industries still Play Old Games: From the Banana Republic to Donkey Kong

This article explores the video games industry as part of what has become known as the "cultural industries" (Hesmondhalgh 2002), using Latin America as a case study. We suggest that the video game industry possesses a political economy that responds to the same principles and patterns a conventional business does. In our view, this industry has specific technological values defined by "convergence and digitalisation" (Baldwin et al. 1996) and shared by other so-called new media. We suggest that they are indeed key factors in explaining the development of this sector, but,as we argue, by no means represent an alteration of the relationships between the economic agents of production, distribution and consumption. Instead, like other cultural industries, the video games industry tends to reproduce the political economy of the system of relations in both the structure (economical level) and superstructure (ideological level), at least in the case of Latin America.