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Should Game Developers Unionize?

The answer is yes, duh.

Last week, Activision fired 800 people from across its lines of business. Some of those people directly helped make your favorite games. Others were play-testers, analysts, middle- and low-level designers, people in clerical roles, and support reps. And the reason they lost their jobs, unceremoniously, many of them stuck in the parking lot waiting outside for the bad news, is because - Activision had an amazing year, financially. But not as amazing as they would have liked. 

Yeah. Eight hundred people lost their jobs because the business’s fiscal year was okay, not horrible. You know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

One guy, a designer, was here on a work visa. He has 60 days to find a replacement employer or he’ll get deported. 

https://twitter.com/Eri_gc/status/1095503967730118656

But if you ask the CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick, 2018 was a record year. It was such a record year for Activision’s revenue that when Kotick rehired Dennis Durkin as Chief Financial Officer, he awarded Durkin a $15m signing bonus. Kotick himself makes over $30m a year, or 306 times what the average Activision employee makes. 

It’s too late for the 800 skilled-yet-unemployed workers who helped Activision rake in $1.8bn last year. But it’s not too late for the rest of Activision’s workforce, and it’s not to late for the slew of other companies in the triple-A game space. Companies like Ubisoft, Bungie (who just got out from under Activision’s thrall), Rockstar and others for whom long periods of crunch and other harsh working conditions are common. Those companies, in solidarity with any independent game worker who believes in a working environment that doesn’t treat them like trash, are prime unionization zones.

What does unionization entail? It’s simple. Unionization helps create the infrastructure at a given workplace for employees to band together without fear of losing their jobs for doing so. By banding together, unionized workers can demand better working conditions, an end to workplace injustices, better pay, and a more ethical working environment overall. Using a variety of tactics, including strike actions and collective bargaining, unions can help make everyone’s lives better.

And if you don’t work for a video game developer, don’t worry - your life is made better by unions, too! The video game industry is currently in the grip of a very pernicious plague. Companies want to make games into “live services” and essentially hook you and your wallet up to a cash vacuum indefinitely. As it stands, triple-A game developers and publishers like Activision don’t have an incentive to change this state of affairs. They’re pushing their workers to produce more content at a faster rate with more monetization methods like lootboxes and other microtransactions, and it’s hurting the quality of life of those workers, as well as the quality of the games they’re making. If you’re tired of annual-release games with a bevy of glorified gambling mechanics tacked on, chances are so are the workers who had to put those features into the latest Call of Duty release. 

Stand up with those workers and stop spending your money on microtransactions. Demand that these companies unionize. Demand that the steady stream of bullshit stops. 

Here’s the thing, though. Consumer action won’t accomplish anything without employee action, and vice versa. Boycotts will only get non-unionized workers fired, and unionization without consumer support has a greater chance of failure. If we all act in solidarity with each other, however, there’s a greater chance of success across the board. 

So should game devs unionize? Absolutely. That means that game consumers will have to group together as well. 

[noescapevg]

“Politics? In MY Video Games? It’s more likely than you think.”

Welcome to No Escape, a video game writing blog by me, Trevor Hultner. I’m a 27-year-old human person on the internet who thinks writing about video games will somehow bring me joy still, in 2019. I should definitely know better, but here I am!

Earlier this week, video game media Twitter started buzzing about an op-ed by Russ Pitts, the Editor-in-Chief over at the “New” Escapist Magazine, which was relaunched late last year. In this op-ed, Pitts took the “branching paths” approach to essay-writing, going down many different avenues of conversation regarding “ethics in games journalism” toward an overall point of... and I quote: 

“To be honest, I don’t know [where this leaves us]. The last time we all tried to have this conversation it … didn’t go well. But the industry, the media, and you all deserve more, and the only way we’ll get there is if we can try again.”

Pitts has taken the old post down (a copy of which you better believe I’ve saved) and put an apology up in its place. He apologizes for potentially instigating remnants of GamerGate to go after their old targets yet again, but... 

I think I’m getting too far ahead of myself. There’s a time and place to critique Pitts’ post and his apology, and that time is coming soon, but why are we here to start with? 

Entertainment is not exempt from politics

There seems to be a widespread belief among people who are not outwardly far-right ideologues that the things we enjoy - music, movies, books, video games - are not inherently political. A book is just a book, a game is just a game, and so on. And these things we enjoy should be convergence points: places where people from everywhere on the socio-cultural-political spectrum can come together and share in the enjoyment. 

The thing is, games - as well as books, movies, music, etc. - are made by people, and people can’t help but be shaped by the world around them. Our influences are most of the time very expressly political, even if we’re not picking up on the messages right away. 

Here’s an example. Destiny and Destiny 2 are two highly popular post-Halo FPS games from Bungie. The franchise’s overarching story is exceedingly simple: You play a reborn and functionally immortal “Guardian” of the remnants of humanity. Your franchise-long mission, given to you by your Ghost, is to defend humanity and something called the Traveler, which is also the source of your new supernatural powers, from the forces of the Darkness. The easiest way to carry out your mission is to defeat hordes of enemies by shooting, punching and superpowering your way to victory. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy. No politics at all, right? 

Well.

As you play the games, and especially the campaign for Destiny 2, you catch glimpses of a heavily-stratified class society, with the essentially-divinely-chosen Guardians on top and mortal humanity below them. The Guardians have built a massive wall around the Last Safe City on Earth with the functional purpose of keeping humanity’s enemies at bay, but we hear from one character how the walls also serve to keep humanity in, essentially forming a prison state. 

Then there’s the moral quandary of your stated mission: kill everything that wants to kill the Light. While there are at least two very evil alien factions in the game (the Vex and the Hive/Taken), two more exist with more ambiguous motives, or at the very least, a much less well-defined alignment with the Darkness. The Fallen (whose actual species is called the Eliksni) and the Cabal are two alien armies the Guardians face off against where our acts of killing them seem more... genocidal than with the former, more markedly “evil” enemies. 

The Eliksni in particular sits in a tragic position: their mission is to simply reclaim the techno- and morphological blessings the Traveler bestowed upon them, and to rebuild their society after their own collapse (known in the lore as The Whirlwind). The Cabal don’t seem super interested in the Traveler, at least not at first, and their incursion on Earth doesn’t actually take place until Dominus Ghaul brings the Red Legion planetside. Why couldn’t we negotiate with them instead of fighting? It’s questionable. 

“Okay, fine, Destiny is political. But not every game has to be!” You might be muttering to yourself. And that’s true! Not every game has to be political. But that doesn’t stop many games from being expressly political, and that doesn’t stop developers from having political views that shape the way they do business, at the very least.

And for that matter, that doesn’t stop the game’s audience from being political, even if they think they’re not. Misogyny, transphobia and homophobia, racism, ableism and other bigotries have expressly political and ideological roots. And I hate to break it to you, but when people who share ideologies group together to collectively organize around those ideologies, a la GamerGate, that’s a definitively political act. When “gamers” decried the gleeful Nazi-punching in the latest Wolfenstein edition, that was a political act. 

There is No Escape

I always find myself at a disadvantage when I decide to start talking about politics, because of the deep ideological gap between myself and my interlocutors most of the time. I’m an anarchist with roots in punk rock music, which has deeply effected the lens in which I view the entire world. I’m used to the idea that everything is political. You might not be. That’s okay. Be open to new possibilities. Just realize that there is no escape. 

I’m starting this blog partly out of spite for folks like Pitts at the Escapist, but also because I think it actually is possible to spark conversations about the nature of ethics in video games as a whole, and that these conversations don’t need to be led by the same tired media voices. By embracing politics the way politics has embraced us, there might actually come a day where people don’t have to rehash the same six tired discussions over and over again.

The image at the top of this post is a screenshot from HBomberguy’s massive Donkey Kong 64 marathon livestream. He raised $340,000 out of spite for transphobic washed up comedy writers, and in the process, got Chelsea Manning and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the same chatroom for a little bit. He got John Romero to say “Trans Rights” on stream. That’s some wild stuff, and it was absolutely expressly political.

There is no other kind of situation where something like that could happen.

So what is there to do?

Well, that’s a broad question. This blog will examine video games through a political lens, that much is for sure. Ideally, like really “pie in the sky” stuff here, this blog would be a resource for people wanting to know more about issues in the video game industry as a whole and wanting something to “do” about those issues. But as for you? 

Get used to the idea of politics in your games, and get acclimated with the problems facing the people in the industry who aren’t collecting fat checks from their labor. Support efforts to unionize games workers, and support indie devs when you can. Hopefully, over time, we can all be organized for a better games future.

Thanks for reading!