Precarity and Why Indie Game Developers Can’t Save Us from Racism

Introduction

Digital game labor research on the AAA (i.e., mid-sized or major developers and publishers) and indie (i.e., small companies or independent) sectors has examined inequities within developers’ cultural work—inequities which are often repressed through nondisclosure agreements and other practices designed to protect intellectual property and trade secrets (Crogan 2018; Hammar 2017; Harvey and Fisher 2013; Kerr 2006; O’Donnell 2014; Srauy 2017). Exploring issues of labor and inequality at the intersection of AAA and indie sectors, this article examines the perception of the indie sector as key to mitigating the production of racializing or racist game content. I adopt Anamik Saha’s (2018, 11) call to “switch the question from how cultural industries represent race, to how cultural industries make race.” For Saha, questions of representation are of continuing importance, but we cannot forget that race also is the result of market-based cultural production decisions and logics: such cultural production practices are intrinsic to the process of creating race. Furthermore, cultural industries are reductive toward racial identities in part because economic efficiencies are interwoven with strategies of racial governance under neoliberal capitalism (Saha 2016, 2018).

In this article, I consider why the economic and labor dynamics of indie digital games development have not demonstrably increased or improved representation of marginalized subjectivities within games. Assuming that indie game developers are uniquely positioned to remediate racism is, I contend, misguided because it relies on a “lack of recognition of how such texts are a product of the cultural industries and also of rationalized and standardized industrial processes that determine the way that the text appears at the point of consumption” (Saha 2018, 6). My commentary is informed by interviews with six developers working in the United States or Canada whom I recruited through snowball sampling. AAA developers, as the creators of the most widely circulated games, retain a dominant professional voice within the game industry. As such, AAA developers’ perceptions of indie game development strongly inform how the “indie” scene, indie labor, and inequalities therein are seen. The majority of my research participants work for AAA studios, whereas one research participant works for a major indie studio. Four research participants identified as white and two identified as people of color. I conducted semi-structured interviews to uncover participants’ views of the indie scene, and all participants have been given pseudonyms. Although my research participants occupied various positions within the game industry, all participants identified as developers, and they expressed similar perspectives on development, inequality—racism within games, specifically—and indie games as a force for social change. My participants consistently expressed the belief that independent digital games hold potential to free game culture from “greedy” AAA publishers that seek security in sameness or regularly produce and market games for a white, male, heterosexual player identity. Although this view of indies is echoed in some game studies literature (Anthropy 2012; Hammar 2017; Westecott 2013), other scholars have suggested that indie developers, too, can reify the industry’s dominant imagined player subjectivity (Harvey and Shepherd 2017).

Joseph A. Schumpeter’s (2008) notion of “creative destruction” is helpful to frame the macro-level transformations in the game industry that have seen a widening out from the AAA sector to include an indie sector. Creative destruction is the cycle by which innovation catalyzes market evolution. One dimension of creative destruction posits that large firms, which for a variety of reasons, grow weary of innovation (i.e., the process which initially led them to dominate their market) and come to be challenged by smaller actors, whose size affords them increased risk-tolerance and nimbleness. As they mature, large firms must leverage their wealth to innovate, swallow innovative upstarts, or risk being displaced as industry leaders (Kumar and Sundarraj 2018). Within this broad economic frame, and drawing from my interviews with developers, I argue that indie developers are discursively constructed as those who will “fix” the larger digital game industry’s ills. This positioning does not necessarily translate into economic reward for indie developers and indeed creates narratives around indie game development that potentially deepen developers’ exploitation.

The project to redress representational inequities within games, including racism, shifts on to often-precarious indie developers, intensifying their emotional and cultural labor. This shifting of responsibility occurs when AAA game publishers and developers fail to confront their role in addressing inequality in games. Indie game developers are imagined as the solution, even though, I suggest in this article, there are structural reasons that explain why indie developers are less able to address such inequities. This responsibility also constitutes additional immaterial labor (Lazzarato 1996), which especially burdens developers of color. AAA developers may be inclined to perceive the emergence of the indie sector as encompassing unique “indie freedoms” that empower indie developers to ameliorate inequality in digital game culture. However, this perspective underestimates the precariousness of independent game production and indie developers. Economic precariousness may in fact encourage indies to repeat certain patterns of racial representation, which suggests the “rationalizing/racializing logic of capital” (Saha 2018). Although I do not dismiss the deleterious labor conditions of AAA developers, the institutional power represented by their sector makes them well positioned to address in-game representation.

AAA Games and Games Culture

The developers I interviewed recognize the critique of racism in games but nonetheless see AAA game development as constrained by the assumption that non-white protagonists, for example, are risky. In the games industry as in television, cinema, or other media industries, certain markers denote media artifacts as for Others, not for the mainstream (see Saha 2016). The AAA developers in my research regard indies as a privileged site to redress inequality in game representation. This idealization is rooted in the present neoliberal moment, where market forces are viewed as key to resolving social inequalities. Although indie developers are to an extent free to challenge narratives that depict race problematically, social structures and commercial logics modulate this freedom (see Foucault 1981, 1982). Developers, after all, are compelled to produce games that make money. As Marcus states,

[W]hat’s most important for these games . . . even [to] the independent game developers who tell stories they want to [is] at the end of the day, they need to sell their games regardless of the message they’re trying to say. . . There’s a lot of things that are expected, but they don’t want you to challenge the status quo, almost because it’s not a practical business decision. And that’s really what’s hindering games. (Marcus)

Marcus’ comments reveal a double-bind that indie developers face, which I will discuss further below. Simply put, games must make money, and thus business priorities overshadow content decisions. Yet one of the dominant assumptions seems to be that indie developers are free from such considerations.

Creative (Indie) Destruction

My participants’ views of indie development—that indie games can challenge dominant depictions of race within game culture—overlook precarious labor issues (see Ruberg, this issue). Responsibility for contesting racism in games is offloaded from relatively powerful AAA developers and publishers to relatively powerless indie developers. According to Schumpeter (2008), few big firms dominate large industries. Such firms face inducements to limit capital, market, and opportunity risks by innovating just enough to reduce the threat to their market share posed by competing firms. Risk aversion, however, allows smaller firms, for whom innovation appears to be a less risky proposition, to develop a more creative product, production method, or service that will contribute to the “destruction” of the current dominant firms’ positions at the top of the market. Consider this comment from developer Carlos:

Now, I actually think the failure rate of indie games is probably the same, percentage wise, as big-budget games, right? We’re like, ten percent to twenty percent max of games are successful. The rest are failures commercially, or critically. I think that’s actually true of indie games. For every Braid, there are probably dozens of games that no one played, or heard of, or bought, right? But when they do get their breakthroughs, or when they do something that is different or unique, it’s very personal. Or at least it feels like it’s more personal. I think it’s because of the smaller teams that it can be more personal. That I think is appealing to the rest of us. And, they’re trying new things. (Carlos)

Carlos seems to assume that indie developers have freedom from AAA industry norms and economic pressures that allows indies to develop diverse narratives and characters—even in the face of the evidence stacked against them (i.e., high failure rate, which Carlos mentions). The logic here seems to be that as smaller firms lack significant market share, innovation presents little risk (money or investment excepted) and great potential for rewards. Yet the size of the game industry and the trend of publisher acquisitions (Takahashi 2018) challenge this logic.

In this broad context, indies are seen as a key solution to racism within game texts (Hammar 2017; Mattos 2016). As industry leaders, AAA developers face endogenous pressure to avoid risks. Risk aversion tends to lead to media content that relies on rather than rejects racism, sexism, and homophobia, for example. I contend that AAA developers mistakenly view indie games as well positioned to correct inequality in game texts, partly because the prevalence of precarious labor within the independent game sector makes indies structurally ill-equipped to out-innovate. Indie game developers may replicate extant inequalities (e.g., game content that is racist, sexist, or homophobic) to mitigate some market risks. Indies’ risk-ameliorating behavior emulates AAA business strategies, with such emulation providing indies a way to negotiate the unpredictability of a game’s commercial success.

Challenging Racism: AAA and Publishers

Schumpeter (2008) argues that the barriers to enter the market increase as industries mature. This means that innovation is not necessarily sufficient on its own to allow smaller companies to challenge dominant players (see also Glezos 2010; Kumar and Sundarraj 2018). Indeed, there is a clear market pattern in the game industry whereby large firms acquire smaller competitors precisely to absorb innovations. Innovations in game design, including challenging racialized content, could theoretically spread from indie developers—but only if those types of innovations capture a large enough segment of the market to warrant being absorbed by large firms in the first place. Indie firms, as noted, may opt for emulation as a strategy to mitigate their risks (see Saha 2018; Tschang 2007). Within the supposedly more open and progressive indie games world, there is evidence of tendencies to replicate narratives that exclude marginalized identities (see Fisher and Harvey 2013; Harvey and Fisher 2013). “Safer” development strategies are likely to sustain racial patterns of representation and racism for the reasons noted earlier. Of course, whether or not racism is actually a safer strategy is beside the point. As it is impossible to operate in an environment of perfect market information (Stiglitz 2002), belief in safer strategies is what matters. Firms fill in the gap with assumptions rooted in societal discourses, including racism (Bonilla-Silva 2009; Saha 2018).

Why Indies Are Less Able to “Fix” Inequality

My analysis of the limits on and inflated expectations for indies to ameliorate racialized patterns of representation in game culture concurs with what Saha (2018) calls the “rationalizing/racializing logic of capital.” This encompasses the propensity of cultural industries to categorize content produced by people of color as exclusively for a minority group while viewing content by white producers as for general audiences. My informants embrace an imaginary of indie game development as an “escape” from the racial problems of AAA game development. In contrast to AAA games, which they see as trapped by market pressures, my informants perceive the indie sector as somehow “outside” of markets (see Anthropy 2012; Westecott 2013; Whitson 2012). This is shaped, in part, by a game development mystique, where developers are seen as engaged in labor as “play,” or “not serious work” (O’Donnell 2012, 2014).

The work-as-play view is pronounced in indie game development (Harvey and Shepherd 2017). The belief that game development is “not real work” and that indie labor is free from the sullying influence of money arguably intensifies the exploitation of indie game labor where developers work unpaid or for little pay. Indie developers do not, of course, completely escape the logic of AAA development, with “the most celebrated indies” tending to be those “who most closely mirror the aesthetics, mechanics and priorities of the mainstream industry” (Harvey and Shepherd 2017, 504). Indies remain embedded within neoliberal culture—and within the rationalizing/racializing logic of capital, which AAA developers identify as shaping why they resort to racist game narratives (Srauy 2017). Like other creative industries, digital games has its own “industry lore” (Havens cited in Saha 2018, 120), referring to the “understanding of how an audience is going to react to a particular cultural good, gleaned from a combination of market research, experience and gut feeling” (Saha 2018, 120–21). My developers imagined a target demographic for whom they believed they must tailor their games, conflating speculation and normative beliefs about the industry as data. The view of a gamer as predominantly a white, heterosexual male is the result of such “industry lore” (Shaw 2009, 2010; Srauy 2017).

As noted above, indie games cannot “fix” inequality, even as the indie game scene is imagined to permit diverse representations. As Carlos explains,

[A]n indie developer can go: “What do I want to make that’s interesting?” And make what they think is cool, and not care, for the most part, what other people are thinking about it. Because they do that, they are able to, at times, make more interesting games. . . I’m not constrained by what system I work in. Like, I’m constrained at times—and I’m OK with the constraints because I have tons of freedom—and more importantly, I’m working on games that I want to work on. (Carlos)

Western societies structurally reify racist discourses in the guise of seemingly nonracist ideas (Bonilla-Silva 2009). Othered characters are increasingly commonplace in games, but, to paraphrase Shaw (2009), until games featuring examples of marginalized bodies—racial minorities, in this case—reach a level of mundanity, white, heterosexual bodies will remain normative in games. So, why does game culture laud the “professional indie,” when developers largely adopt AAA aesthetics and narratives (Harvey and Shepherd 2017) that indie games are perceived to counter? To begin to answer this question, it is necessary to consider the labor conditions within indie development.

Creative Destruction: Precarious (Indie) Labor

Research suggests that creative labor in the “new economy” involves a bait-and-switch: flexible work is often framed as empowering, but this obscures the precariousness that often results from labor flexibility (Discenna 2017; Gill 2013; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2008, 2010). Subjection to precarious conditions prompts labor to hew closely to traditional power dynamics. Among indie developers, exploitation includes bearing the affective burden of responsibility for “fixing” games, which is a facet of the invisible emotional labor of indie development. The responses from the AAA developers I interviewed give some indication of how the precariousness of indie labor is neglected in narratives that emphasize indies as a space of freedom. Evoking a creative destruction process, one developer, Emil, predicts,

I think you’re seeing the old industry explode—the old games industry as we’ve previously seen it . . . I think what you’re going to see in the next couple of years is a tremendous explosion of independent game productions through crowdsourcing and through Xbox Live Arcade. As far as how it will go with representation of characters, I think it will improve. A lot of people are doing this work now, where this is much more of an art form. (Emil)

Emil refers to indie games as “an art form,” which is contrasted to the “old industry.” Such narratives underscore that indie labor is “different” and indeed “not quite work.” As Mathias Fuchs (2014, 153) asserts in the context of gamification, “the attempt to harmonize play and labour, however, is ideology.” My participants’ belief that they are less able to address racism than their indie counterparts rests on a perception of indie game development as more play than work, and in turn allows AAA developers to believe they lack power to change representational patterns in the game industry.

Immaterial Labor: The Cost of “Getting In” and “Getting On” in Indie Labor

Indie digital game development is work. For white indie developers, alongside the insecurities of whether one has a job day-to-day, the stresses of precarious work include the lack of access to institutional protections in the form of unions, healthcare, and so forth (Bulut 2015; Neff et al. 2005). For indie developers of color, precarious labor takes an additional affective toll; that is, indie developers of color must undertake affective labor (see Hardt and Negri 2000) to address diverse and, at times, racist content in games, which consequently enables their own self-exploitation. There are material costs to “getting in” and “getting on” in creative industries (Gill 2013; Jarrett 2014). Although some indie development is solitary, much of this work is collaborative. In addition, there are marketing costs. Indie games tend to be marketed through word-of-mouth (Lipkin 2012). Constructing oneself as an ideal “game developer” is immaterial labor.

Most game studios engage publishers on a project basis. This is similar to how film and television projects depend on studios for support. But whereas many film and television production workers are unionized, game developers’ lack of unionization highlights their precarity. The project-to-project organization of game development work shapes an industry that is “structurally insecure with a strong dependence upon freelance and some very poorly paid workers” (Thanki and Jefferys 2007, 113). That the indie development workforce is demographically similar to AAA (Passmore et al. 2017) and that there are economic pressures on developers to hew closely to normative aesthetics (Harvey and Shepherd 2017) suggests socio-economic costs for deviation from industry norms. Moreover, previous studies identify an increased social cost for Othered individuals to enter creative industries in general (Gill 2013). The new economy requires labor to actively maintain social connections outside of the workplace (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010). These social outings are more than mere causal activities; they are ways in which workers in creative industries maintain, increase, and exercise their social capital in their industry. This becomes an oversized cost for Othered individuals’ participation in social activities when their racial identity and heritage are not compatible with white-normative cultural experiences, limiting their social capital and opportunities for advancement within the industry (Gill 2014).

The Double-bind: The Invisible Labor of Reifying Oppressive Discourses

Research suggests that indies are no more likely to have diverse characters than their AAA counterparts (Passmore et al. 2017). This implies that despite indies being regarded—according to the AAA developers in my research, at least—as a privileged site on which to contest racism in games, imitating AAA game aesthetics of privileging white characters is also normative for indie developers of color. Because making games is often a collaborative practice, contesting racism by resisting those norms risks unemployment. If increasing Othered game developers is a correct strategy (Hammar 2017), there are additional immaterial labor costs (Jarrett 2014).

“Outspoken” indie developers of color might be less likely to find work (see Gill 2013). For a moment, let us assume that there would be no negative costs to speaking out against racism during the game design process. Even in this case, however, there would be additional labor performed by the Othered developer in the games he or she is expected to make, or in how to categorize them. Likewise, if an LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer), person of color, or woman developer participates in making a game that challenges dominant narratives, these developers risk being pigeonholed as only makers of games for Othered groups, resulting in opportunity costs (see Saha 2016). These expectations would not necessarily come from consumers; they come from colleagues, who are supportive of diverse representations in games (see Srauy 2017).

Game developers may see inequality as a problem. But prior to selling games to consumers, games must be categorized and marketed in accordance with existing market categories. This rationalizing/racializing logic of capital that is present in creative industries extends to the digital games industries. Difference is categorized, set into a place where it is assumed it will perform well in market terms. This is the decision-making procedure within creative industries (Saha 2018). For Saha (2016, 2018), this rationalizing/racializing logic is in part a socially and culturally shaped economic impulse that forms in response to risk.

For the AAA developers I interviewed, challenging racism within indie development is a net positive. Developers of color are double-bound, that is, forced to constantly expend immaterial labor to either stay silent and maintain work ties or speak out and become victims of a rationalizing logic of capital that channels one’s career into bounded categories. Simply having more people of color as developers in the game industry is not enough to diversify representation within games. As I demonstrated in this article, the process of cultural production in digital games and the discourses surrounding indie developers act against racial justice. As Saha (2018) argues, more diversity in creative industry labor does not guarantee more diversity in content. Therefore, new norms must emerge to elucidate what creative destruction tells us: if racially equitable narratives are “innovative,” that innovation ought to come from the most powerful actors in the industry.

Solutions?

For my interviewees, the economic logics that govern AAA game development regard narratives that decenter white, male, heterosexual characters and players as too risky—and these AAA developers call on indie development labor to “fix” inequality in game culture. The extent to which the indie game world will do this remains to be seen. The demographics, norms, and economic pressures on indie developers belie my developers’ hope in the power of indies. Market strategies alone are insufficient to elicit change in patterns of racial representation in game culture. My research suggests that both AAA and indie developers share a desire for “freedom” to create games “outside” market confines. If game development seeks to ameliorate inequality in games, the site of struggle is not only market decisions or game narratives but also the subjectivities of AAA and indie developers. Such struggles might benefit from greater professional discussion of racial representation in games as a part of what Casey O’Donnell (2014) describes as the networked assemblages of game creators, inclusive of “homebrew” developers, who constitute nodes of resistance. Stating that markets induce projects that reproduce racially problematic narratives is not novel. Much has been written about this concerning television and film, for example (see Schatz 2003). This article attempts to move us toward understanding the problems in shouldering indie developers with the burden of improving racial representation in games, to provide an account of how market logics in the game industry reproduce racism, and to offer an analysis of how we might advance racial justice by attending to the economic and labor conditions of indie game development.