Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

For being such a big deal, the video game industry isn’t treated very seriously. Let’s not make any mistake here: the industry is a big deal. Globally, yearly sales rival or surpass those of the Hollywood. Entire cities are planning on making video games the cornerstones of their new economies. They’re played at least as much by adults as by children. Yet there’s a dearth of rigorous coverage of the industry. The video game press, such as it is, remains mired in a culture of payola and ad revenue addiction, outside of a few outlets like Gamasutra . The one television station devoted to industry news, G4 (which has moved away from covering only video games), seemed committed to proving every gamer stereotype true, with an endless parade of uncritical corporate press releases punctuated only by sophomoric oral sex jokes. All of which is a shame, because something in the industry is wrong. Here, as in few other places, we see the kind of exploitation normally associated with the industrial sector in creative work. Already subject to lower wages when compared to the broader tech sector, video game studios’ management maintain the status quo by consciously manipulating the desires of writers, artists, and coders hoping to break into a creative field. The profit vacuumed up goes to ever more bloated management salaries and the unremittingly glitzy, tacky spectacles churned out by gaming’s PR departments. The exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how the rest of us may be working in years to come.

Few outside of the video game industry would think of gaming as a site for major labor abuse and exploitation. The real state of things occasionally bubbles up into the mainstream press when the situation becomes too great to ignore, as with the infamous EA Spouse controversy a decade ago – the first time the industry’s labor practices were discussed on a national scale. EA, the largest, most successful video game company in the world at that time, was revealed (through a blog post by a software engineer’s wife, herself a game developer) as a place which insisted on permanent “crunch time,” cutting costs by insisting on up to 80-hour work weeks from employees rather than hiring more workers to make production schedules. The story broke at a time when EA was buying up small studios throughout the industry, enforcing its particularly draconian standards on workers with little say in the matter. After lawsuits filed in the wake of the scandal, EA was forced to soften its practices. The titular EA Spouse, Erin Hoffman, formed a small watchdog group, hoping to monitor abuses. Once the media inevitably lost interest, however, the industry as a whole returned to its culture of inhumanly long hours, too little pay, and high burnout – and remains there today. I came into the video game industry in 2007 through working at Funcom (where I did not witness anything extraordinarily abusive). I entered as a blank slate, not knowing what to expect or why I did it other than the fact that I liked video games and it seemed like a cool job. I was a QA engineer, and a QA’s job is to break things in-game, record how the things were broken, and then pass the information to the content creation team, who would hopefully fix them. It’s a common entry-level gig in the industry, one which gives you a broad knowledge of how things work to eventually launch something more specialized. Most of my coworkers viewed their gigs at Funcom as having “arrived.” Almost all of them had come through Red Storm, one of the most respected studios in the country and an industry linchpin in North Carolina. The stories they told were galling: gross underpayment, severe overworking, and middle management treating the cubicle farm as a little fiefdom all their own. Red Storm at the time employed the bulk of their QAs as temps. Lured in by promises of working their way up the ladder, scores of college kids and young workers would come in, ready to make it in the new Hollywood of the video game industry. The pay was minimum wage. The hours were long, with one of my immediate supervisors casually stating that he regularly worked at least 60 hours a week during his time there. Being temps, there were no benefits. This would go on for the duration of a project, usually the final four months or so. When the temps weren’t needed anymore, it was common for groups of them to be rounded up, summarily let go without notice, and told that a call would be forthcoming if their services were needed again. There were other stories – strange and mean ones, like the producer who waltzed into the QA office and asked if anyone was heading for the dumpster. When no one answered, she dropped a big bag of garbage in the middle of the floor, snarled, “I guess I’ll just leave this here, then,” and stalked off; the QA lead chewed them out since the woman was a producer, a project manager. Everyone who came through related the same story of QA’s complete sequestration from the development team; nobody was allowed to speak to a “dev” directly, only through intermediaries, nor to enter the dev side of the building. The QA temps were a clear underclass on one floor, while full-time “real” video game workers occupied the other. At the time, I didn’t understand why someone wouldn’t leave such a situation. The pay was awful, the hours too long, and it sounded like a rotten place to work if even a fraction of the stories I’d hear over lunch breaks were true. But everyone kept returning to some variation of the same theme: it was their dream to work in the video game industry.

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is “the largest nonprofit membership in the world serving all individuals who create video games.” It is not, as its brass are usually quick to point out, a union. They want to advocate, in that distinctively American liberal way, for good working conditions and fair compensation for their members without rocking the boat too much – such a thing would be unseemly for developers on the frontier of the twenty-first century tech industry. The IGDA’s board rotates and consists largely of luminaries from the industry’s management class (perhaps unsurprising, given its more or less explicitly anti-unionization stance). A CEO or manager comes in for a bit, rolls out when his or her term is up, and is replaced by another with similar views on labor. One such board member was particularly big: Mike Capps, then head of Epic Games. Capps is a major figure in the industry, with Epic being a major gaming company. Rich, outspoken, and powerful, in a 2008 panel, while serving on the board, he let slip what everyone running the industry thinks but won’t say for matters of decorum. The exact quotes have weirdly disappeared into the ether, scrubbed from the IGDA’s minutes, but Capps stated bluntly that Epic would not hire people willing to work for less than 60 hours a week; that this was not a quality of life issue but a matter of Epic’s corporate culture, and that it was patently absurd that anyone getting into the industry shouldn’t expect the same. The furor over the comments was immense. Greg Costikyan, a writer and industry critic, delivered a scathing rebuke. He was followed by others, from all corners of the gaming world. This was too much, apparently; as with EA Spouse, the industry’s mask had slipped too far for the incident to pass without comment. Capps was forced to run damage control, particularly after the head of the IGDA, the person most responsible for setting the tone of the organization, gave tacit approval to his comments, stating that “work/life balance also goes far beyond the number of hours worked. Quality of life also varies significantly according to the individual.” Though the incident drew attention at the time, the follow-up interviews, where Capps doubled down on what his expectations and payoffs for industry workers were, were largely ignored. “Games like Gears, you know, it’s one of the best reviewed games of all-time. . . You don’t get a game out like that with a bunch of people who don’t have any passion about the quality of the product and don’t want to spend that one extra night,” Capps states. The p-word, “passion,” is used three times in the interview.