Abstract
The labor conditions of video game workers have begun to catch media and scholarly attention during the past few years with the sector’s strong union drive in response to the widespread practice of crunch time. Among the burgeoning labor literature analyzing the video game industry, Ergin Bulut’s A Precarious Game constitutes the most timely and systematic intervention. It provides novel and critical perspectives to expose the temporal and spatial politics of video game work, challenging the often monotonizing and static depiction of this labor of love.
The book is based on Bulut’s intensive ethnography at Studio Desire, then a flagship studio of a publicly traded company Digital Creatives. It succinctly delineates Desire’s journey in four interrelated processes: “rationalization upon acquisition, spatialization, financialization, and precarization” (p. 4), with each stage rendering the reorganization and intensification of labor control over game developers. Instead of viewing precarity solely as a pre-determined and top-down feature imposed by the labor regime, Bulut conceptualizes it as an evolving bottom-up process governing labor subjectivities. Such perspective is best illustrated by the fate of game developers in the post-2008 crisis context.
Bulut proposes the notion of ludopolitics to illuminate the regime of inequality in and beyond the daily operation of Desire. The most manifest line of demarcation is drawn between gamers who get to enjoy the game and game workers who make the game. However, exploitation and inequality within video game production tend to be glossed over due to the pervasive “play as work” narrative which has deep roots in the Atari era. As Bulut’s ethnography of school-based recruitment events demonstrates, workers and aspiring developers subscribe to the Post-Fordist work ethic, internalizing the need for nonmonetary motivations such as unquestionable passion and unpaid internship. Crunch culture becomes more tolerable due to flexible schedules and a playful atmosphere, which are created by managers to maximize developers’ productivity and creativity even outside normal working hours.
Inequality also pervades in the broader “social factory” where other forms of devalued and unpaid work are conducted primarily by women and minorities. The glamorous veneer surrounding game development work overshadows direct extraction from the formal workforce, but more importantly, it renders invisible the reproductive work carried out by developers’ women partners. These middle-class spouses overwhelmingly shoulder domestic work and provide emotional support for the male workforce, which dramatically reduces the studio’s investment in labor reproduction. Instead of lauding their partners’ dream career, many developers’ spouses criticize Desire for reinforcing technomasculinity and insecure working conditions. On a global scale, Desire's creativity work is also made possible by manufacturing, recycling, and outsourced art workers in the Global South, whose composition is deeply racialized and gendered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more privileged position of male developers leads to a stronger identification with the creative class rather than with workers, legitimizing the sociocultural infrastructure built on white masculinity.
Bulut emphasizes the importance of temporality and spatiality in understanding the trajectory of Desire. After its acquisition by Digital Creatives, the early sense of precarity defined by garage culture evolves into a new stage marked by “an intensification of the labor process” (p. 71). Ostensible financial security is coupled with mounting pressures from the publisher, other studios, and the volatile stock market. In terms of spatial dynamics, Desire’s relocation to a Midwest city revitalizes local economy and helps breed new cultural practices. Partnering with the city to provide an affordable living environment, it successfully brands itself as a viable alternative to large creative hubs. Nevertheless, through the process of revitalization, new boundaries emerge to decide who can imagine and participate in these creative economies.
The book dedicates another chapter to QA testers, who constitute the most exemplar case to divulge the degradation of fun and internal stratification among game workers. Despite their own identities as white-collar employees, testers at Desire are treated as a support team as opposed to core developers. They are also subject to more rigid surveillance by supervisors and coworkers in the tester pit, prevented from enjoying those work-from-home benefits taken for granted by developers. Unsurprisingly, QA testing largely relies on temporary workers, who are made to occupy the most vulnerable position in the studio. The labor condition of testers vividly manifests the ubiquitous ludopolitics as it continues to produce and solidify more layers of inequality.
As Bulut has clarified, the type of precarity experienced by these predominately middle-class developers is already a privileged form, as they are immune from direct body injuries and slow-motion environmental injustice. However, even core creatives in a major studio could experience layoffs amid the deepening financialization of the game industry. By providing a nuanced analysis of this creative workforce, A Precarious Game challenges us to rethink the broader implications of the precarization of the professional management class. It thus makes insightful contributions to the debates on video games, digital labor, and the future of work.
