KO_OP describes itself as an “an artist run game studio,” and is your quintessentially quirky modern video game developer, having worked on everything from experimental soundscape projects like Skipping Stones, to the monster face puzzle solver GNOG, and even expansion packs for the Tomb Raider mobile spin-off, Lara Croft GO. Despite this, it’s not what makes KO_OP stand out. It’s the way KO_OP, as a developer, is structured; KO_OP is also a co-op.

“This studio, this company, exists to support the people who are part of it, not the other way around,” said Dabbous. “KO_OP is there for us to take advantage of whatever resources it awards us, be it healthcare, or this opportunity to create a certain piece of art that we really want to see out there in the world.”

The short version of what being a co-op means for KO_OP—and for the record, it’s actually only a coincidence the words are so similar to one another—is workers are also the bosses.

Game creation is often mythologized, blinding us to the everyday work making art possible. A person does not simply sit down at a computer with a clever idea and—voila—video game. This is especially true for games made by a team (or teams) of people who have to work with one another. But while we spend endless energy on the obviously important design work that goes into video games, precious little is spent on understanding the structure supporting it.

“A lot of people don't realize in the discourse around capitalism how ingrained the propaganda elements are from a very young age,” said KO_OP co-founder and studio director Saleem Dabbous during an interview. “When you're told something is the way it is from a very young age and it's repeated in every single piece of media and through the work and through the school system and everything you consume, it's hard to see beyond that.”

Under the new rule of socialist empress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, maybe you’ve heard of the term in passing. Maybe, like me, it’s mostly in the context of the neighborhood grocery store you’re told is owned by a group of people, but, well, what’s that even mean? The notion of a co-op, in which a business is explicitly owned by the workers operating it, runs counter to ingrained notions of capitalism and the business/employee relationship; it shifts the power dynamic. The worker being the owner means no distance between the fruits of one’s labor.

To date, KO_OP has not had split decision votes, where part of the studio wants to go in a direction, but it’s technically a majority vote system. Several other KO_OP team members I spoke to echoed Dabbous’ claim that KO_OP’s decisions have largely been universal.

KO_OP is only 10 people, and while each has a distinct role —Dabbous, for example, handles a lot of the day-to-day business decisions, and is often their public spokesperson—they have an equal seat at the table. Every person, for example, has the same salary. If you joined the studio today, you make the same as someone who’s been there since day one. Small decisions are made by individuals, because otherwise nothing would get done, but KO_OP’s big decisions happen as a group.

No one who’s joined KO_OP has left since KO_OP was founded in 2012. (That will change when its co-founder, Bronson Zgeb, leaves next month.) The company did institute a six-month probationary period for new hires, a way of feeling things out, a few years in. So far, only one person decided to move on before the period was up.

This has its own constraints, of course. Nobody at KO_OP has a child, but if someone suddenly required more money to afford child care and other expenses, it doesn’t mean increasing that one person’s salary to accommodate—it means moving up everyone’s salary. KO_OP tries to manage the challenge of this problem by limiting the scope; not many people work at KO_OP by by design.

"When we've made big decisions it's always come down to reaching a consensus as a group," said art director and designer G.P. Lackey, who's been at KO_OP since nearly the start. "This hasn't been a very formal process, but as we've grown a bit the intent is to make sure that it is and that we always steer the decisions as a group."

This sense of equity extends beyond pure salary, too. Dabbous, for example, has put the most amount of his personal savings into establishing KO_OP, foundational money that was needed to get the studio off the ground in the early days—$20,000. But this doesn’t change how money, resources, or power is distributed; it just means Dabbous was there at the start.

“Money just enabled me to start something, and bring in these amazing people,” he said. “They are contributing to the value of the company in so many intangible ways.”

Dabbous was born, raised, and spent his pre-college educational years in Kuwait, a Middle Eastern country that spent decades as a British protectorate, a form of colonialism where territory retains some measure of local autonomy and power. The result is a country where, Dabbous told me, means Western ideas of capitalism are ingrained to the point of propaganda.

He moved to Canada to attend college, and spent a year in business school before he found himself loathing everything he was being taught—it felt wrong, even if he didn’t know why. Without telling his family, Dabbous switched into the English department. (They forgave him, though his father did hang up the phone when it was revealed.) It was there, during a cultural studies course, Dabbous had a personal awakening.

“It gave me the vocabulary and the training to unravel the world around me,” he said, “and that's the approach I've taken towards money and capitalism and running a business.”

Dabbous became involved in the local independent scene, and found himself drawn to creating games. Dabbous and his friend, KO_OP programmer Bronson Zgeb, decided they wanted to start their own thing, and looked towards independent record labels for inspiration. Their goal was to start a place, a sort of artists collective, that allowed people to make cool shit. The literal co-op model came later, after someone pointed out how their goals aligned.