Book Review: Marx at the Arcade: Consoles,Controllers,and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

At a time when the COVID-19 crisis is laying bare, the urgent need to organize traditionally unorganized sections of the working class – the grocery clerks, delivery drivers and retail workers of the world – Jamie Woodcock’s Marx at the Arcade is an important piece of radical scholarship that, in part, pursues such an end. The book is divided into the following two parts: first, a history of videogames as work and as play, as well as a sociological study of the industry’s organization of labor and recent attempts to unionize, and second, a critical analysis of gaming culture. By doing so, Woodcock seeks to understand videogames as ‘a terrain of cultural struggle, shaped by work, capitalism, and ideas about society’ (p. 8).

In order to grasp the role of play in videogames, he borrows a six-part definition from Roger Caillois that describes play as chosen freely, compartmentalized from other aspects of daily life, undetermined in outcome, ‘unproductive’, run using rules different from those of larger society, and ‘make-believe’ in that play is counterposed to the minutiae of ‘real life’. Furthermore, using Marx as a vector to understand play in the particular context of capitalism, Woodcock argues that along with providing ‘a space of experimentation’ and ‘discovery’, videogames also offer workers ‘recovery from capitalist work’ (pp. 16–17). At the same time, there is not always clear separation between work and play as exemplified by the history of video games that Woodcock outlines. Emerging out of the curiosity and boredom of scientists, researchers, and engineers interested in testing the capabilities of modern computing technology, videogames eventually found their way from being novelty by-products of the military-industrial complex to cultural products that sell millions of pieces of software and hardware yearly.

Rather than focus on microscopically detailing, the process that have made videogames such an important element of mass culture in the 21st century, Woodcock uses this brief historiographic sketch as a jumping off point to understand the ‘labor and logistics’ that build ‘the sprites and animations’ (p. 35) which make up the games we play. Pointing to the massive scale of the industry, that is the billions of dollars in revenue generated by the companies that produce the consoles, the software, and packaging, as well as the more intangible work of marketing and retail, he contends that videogames can longer be ignored as a subversive youth subculture, but instead, something that the ‘ruling class see as integral to capitalism’ (p. 42). Not only are videogames a juggernaut of 21st century capitalism, they are also intimately connected to the military-industrial complex. Besides the origins noted earlier, there is also the fact of long-standing consulting work provided by military personnel. Games like Call of Duty rely on the input of these consultants to properly represent life in a warzone, but of course, this work is not done for free, on their end, ‘the army and the state’ (p. 55) receive as reward war’s romanticization.

All of this exposition provides Woodcock with the context to explain the world of work for the videogame industry and current attempts to unionize a conventionally non-union workplace. Arguably, the strongest portion of its book, providing practical insight into breaking barriers to organizing not just for the videogame industry, but white-collar and service work more broadly. He cites the ever more prominent practice of making employees sign non-disclosure agreements, together with the increasingly globalized supply chains of the videogame industry, as creating an opaque organizational structure that make difficult the lives of both the researcher and the labor organizer. Through individual interviews, sociological studies, and industry surveys, he seeks to recreate a view of the workplace ‘from below’ (p. 69). Largely successful in the endeavor, he paints a picture of a Taylorism that bolsters the position of capital through the use of a more and more complex division of labor, the application of further regimented work through practices like crunch time, and hiring practices that purposely create precarity. On the one hand, this work environment has alienated and partially deskilled those employed there, but on the other hand, has provided ‘key mobilizing’ factors to rouse the fighting spirits of a once more comfortable workforce (p. 90).

In sharp contrast to more highly paid jobs in the Global North, Woodcock notes that ‘videogames, whether for computers or consoles, require hardware both to be made and to be played’, and that ‘the conditions under which hardware is made’ is ‘deeply exploitative’ (p. 73). With that in mind, it is a shame that the particulars of those conditions are not more documented in the book, as such a comparative study may have pointed to an international rather than national framework for the organization of videogame labor, which leads to larger point about the overall structure of the book. He devotes only 11 pages to the embryonic movement to organize the industry – focusing primarily on the efforts of the organizations Game Workers United and Tech Workers Coalition to build solidarity among disparate workers across the industry in the United Kingdom and the United States – the rest of the book looks to the culture of playing videogames. While Woodcock provides excellent and deep analysis on both counts, it seems that he might have been better served engaging with one or the other, if not just slightly extending the length of the book.

With his final excavation of videogames as cultural products, Woodcock reminds us that games ‘are made to be played’, and thus, the need to understand ‘the active engagement’ that comes through play (p. 111). Looking to first-person shooters, role-playing and strategy games, political games, and finally, online play, he shows the ways that these genres are both shaped by and shape the larger society that they emerge from in order to help understand gaming culture as a terrain of struggle in which ‘the battle of ideas’ can be ‘won or lost’ (p. 163). This fight, alongside that of the workers that make the games we play, represent one important focal point in a larger attempt to bridge our lives at and outside of work, the culture of the workplace versus the culture of consumption and how they relate to one another. Marx at the Arcade offers a glimpse at how that can be done.