The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry is a legal history of the videogame industry written for non-lawyers. Going beyond the myth of the “great inventor,” and observing complex interwoven business/engineering/legal strategies at the heart of which sit lawyers, it shows how the fates of game companies often rest on legal principles and on the complexity of the legal practice. Rather than being an exhaustive list of court cases, it analyzes the type of interactions between lawyers and organizations. A series of case studies, not in the legal sense, but as vignettes of human comedy, shed light on why and how the role of lawyers is key for understanding the video game industry.  They locate lawyers and their impact throughout the life cycle of games, from company creation and original design, to success, and, sometimes, recall and destruction: lawyers in the design room, in the board room, in court, interacting with their kin and with public opinion, and in international trade.

Julien Mailland (Annenberg PhD ’13) is an associate professor of Media Management, Law, and Policy. His new book, The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry, was published in August 2024 by MIT Press. Mailland’s research interests include technology platforms: history, law, economics, and policy; telecommunications-networks-ecosystems design, law, and policy; First Amendment law; videogame industry; international communication; financial technologies; history of online ecosystems; and Minitel and videotex networks. He is an associate editor for The Information Society. Mailland co-founded the Minitel Research Lab, USA with Kevin Driscoll (Annenberg PhD ’14). The mission of the Lab is to create a comprehensive, independent digital Minitel museum and research center; explore the technical, social, political and legal significance of the Minitel network; and make creative use of the machines to incite critical thinking about network design. Their work and collections have been featured in Wired, ARS Technica, Fox Business News (U.S.), Le Monde, Libération, NEON (France), and Computer Magazine (Ukraine).