A superficial view of the videogames sector gives the impression that its employees and customers—the players of the games—are treated much better than at any time in history. Physical media, including EPROMs in cartridges, CD-ROMs, and Blu-Ray discs, have not been the primary method to distribute games since the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii.
With the end of physical media comes the end of the “death crunch”, that period of development towards the end of the project (but honestly often starting quite near the beginning) where the only way to meet the RTM date (Release to Master, the time when the final software needs to be sent to the duplication plant to make the media that players buy) is to work longer days and weekends, cancel holidays, and generally cause immiseration among your staff. Once the software is on the cartridge or disk, there is no changing it: any bugs in the code are there for eternity. A famous example is the Donkey Kong Kill Screen, where an integer overflow error makes the game unplayable past the 22nd stage.
In the new age of digital storefronts, you release a game before it is ready (maybe the developers of “Duke Nukem Forever” should read this), as a playable early access preview. You get feedback from players, refine your concepts, and launch when you have got a great product. Not a perfect product—because you can still create hotfixes, updates, and DLC (Downloadable Content) to ship fixes after release and create new mini-release buzzes and sales boosts. In fact, using always-connected gameplay, you can even make tweaks to the game silently, while people are playing it.
Sociologist (and former colleague of this author, at Oxford University) Dr. Jamie Woodcock takes a deeper view of the political economics of the videogames industry in his book, “Marx at the Arcade”. We did previously mention this book before, in the “Workers of the Digital World” bookshelf, and even again, when we focused on the history of BASIC. It is time for a deeper read. Woodcock finds that all is not green fields, golden rings, and performance-enhancing mushrooms over in the videogames field.
The availability of perpetual releases actually leads to perpetual death crunches, where there is always an important marketing launch around the corner and always a deadline for developers to meet. Videogame development has become increasingly atomised, so that while a roomful of people might have worked on an important release in the past (Donkey Kong itself was the work of three Nintendo employees, and era-defining platformer “Sonic the Hedgehog” lists 6 people in the credits), a modern triple-A title might have a longer credits sequence than a Marvel movie. This division, along with the general misconception among knowledge workers that “professional” salaried staff do not need trade unions, leads to a lack of organisation among workers that makes them vulnerable to changes in working conditions—including the round of redundancies we have been seeing across software in the last few years.
And it is not only the workers being exploited. The shift to online marketplaces has allowed new opportunities for inhumane sales practices, including interrupting gameplay at exciting or critical moments to engage in microtransactions—turning in-game needs for resources into real-world purchases of coins, stars, loot boxes, and other MacGuffins. Mobile gaming developers have taken the playbooks of gambling companies and turned them against people trying to unwind on their commute, or in their living room at the end of a long day.
Woodcock also researches the culture of videogames, taking in such highlights as #GamerGate (the online harrassment of female participants in the industry under the guise of “ethics in journalism”) and the involvement of the military in normalising (and funding the development of) representations of combat and militarism in videogames, such as the prevalence of first-person shooter (FPS) games. He notes that games that try to present alternative political viewpoints get banned from the distribution platforms, highlighting “Phone Story”. In this game, the player forces children to mine coltan to make phones, prevents worker suicides at a FoxConn factory, forces customers to upgrade their phones through planned obsolescence, and creates mountains of e-waste that pollutes environments in Pakistan.
It is a short, but important book, that shows that this corner of the online entertainment industry is sometimes anything but fun and games.
Cover photo by the author.