A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry

by Ergin Bulut

Overview

A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South.

A Precarious Game explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives.

Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501746536
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2020
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ergin Bulut is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University. He is currently a visitor researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at Annenberg School for Communication. He is co-editor of Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor, and you can follow him on X @ergincloud.

Table of Contents

Introduction: For Whom the Love Works in Video Game Production?
1. The Unequal Ludopolitical Regime of Game Production: Who Can Play, Who Has to Work?
2. The End of the Garage Studio as a Technomasculine Space: Financial Security, Streamlined Creativity, and Signs of Friction
3. Gaming the City: How a Game Studio Revitalized a Downtown Space in the Silicon Prairie
4. The Production of Communicative Developers in the Affective Game Studio
5. Reproducing Technomasculinity: Spouses' Classed Femininities and Domestic Labor
6. Game Testers as Precarious Second-Class Citizens: Degradation of Fun, Instrumentalization of Play
7. Production Error: Layoffs Hit the Core Creatives
Conclusion: Reimagining Labor and Love in and beyond Game Production

What People are Saying About This

Paula Chakravartty

A Precarious Game is an original work that deftly combines a political economy critique of the inequities and hidden violence of the digital economy with critical Feminist analysis of labor and social reproduction.

Vicki Mayer

I know of no other work that chronicles the life cycle and death of a creative industry, and in doing so, potentially tempers the rhetoric celebrating the entrepreneur because it shows that failure is endemic to trying new things.

Dan Schiller

Since the crash of 2008, the power relations that structure digital capitalism have been further extended and systematized. In this provocative, wide-ranging study, Bulut details how social inequalities and exploitative labor practices carry forward in today's digital workshops.

Editorial Reviews

Bulut transports readers inside of video game production to gain a better perspective on the gestalt of the video game industry. This book is a thought-provoking example of media ethnography and would captivate anyone interested in a critical approach to employment relations in any industry where technology and creativity intersect.

ILR Review

Building on "critical political economy, feminist theory, and autonomist Marxism" (p. 11), this book is a much-needed contribution to critical game studies by breaking the glamorous spell over the contemporary forms of immaterial and creative media labor. Theoretical discussions are clear enough to engage with and vividly illustrated in ethnographic research. The language makes the book a fluent read not only for academics but for anyone interested in current modes of capitalism and videogame production.

-- "Critical Studies in Media Communication"

Bulut transports readers inside of video game production to gain a better perspective on the gestalt of the video game industry. This book is a thought-provoking example of media ethnography and would captivate anyone interested in a critical approach to employment relations in any industry where technology and creativity intersect.

-- "ILR Review"

By providing a nuanced analysis of this creative workforce, A Precarious Game challenges us to rethink the broader implications of the precarization of the professional management class. It thus makes insightful contributions to the debates on video games, digital labor, and the future of work.

-- "WORK AND OCCUPATIONS"

From the Publisher

By providing a nuanced analysis of this creative workforce, A Precarious Game challenges us to rethink the broader implications of the precarization of the professional management class. It thus makes insightful contributions to the debates on video games, digital labor, and the future of work.

WORK AND OCCUPATIONS

Building on "critical political economy, feminist theory, and autonomist Marxism" (p. 11), this book is a much-needed contribution to critical game studies by breaking the glamorous spell over the contemporary forms of immaterial and creative media labor. Theoretical discussions are clear enough to engage with and vividly illustrated in ethnographic research. The language makes the book a fluent read not only for academics but for anyone interested in current modes of capitalism and videogame production.

Critical Studies in Media Communication